Click here to view the previous post explaining how SD-WAN fine-tuning affects latency and bandwidth.

Introduction

With the digital age in full swing, businesses of all types are becoming increasingly dependent on efficient, high-speed networks. Especially for organizations that are renting essential network devices like Firewalls, Servers, and Routers. Keeping these devices managed to deliver high performance against different applications is not a small task. Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN) allows organizations to overcome some major networking issues, especially in terms of latency and bandwidth optimization. This blog will explore how tweaking SD-WAN settings can change these metrics to create more reliable and efficient network performance.

Network Latency Challenges

Application performance and user experience are directly affected by network latency, which refers to the time required for a piece of information to be sent from one point to another on the same or different networks. Increased latency will mean slower response times from an application, jitter, and even packet loss – which is unbearable for any business model that runs on real-time data. Many issues lead to high network latency:

• Geographical Distance: If it takes longer for data to travel between endpoints, the delay in response time becomes inevitable. Or in other words, communication between New York and Tokyo will inevitably be sluggish compared to the same city.
• Congestion: Network congestion happens when the number of packets being sent is high, and so it delays as well causes packet loss. This is especially an issue on high-use days.
• Routing Path: Improper routing paths can cause more and unnecessary hops, which means packets will take longer to reach their final destination. Delay in Delivery: Uncompressed files are sent faster compared to the ones whose sizes were reduced and converted into zipped files.
• Network Interference: Things like electromagnetic interference can impact latency from external sources as it might corrupt packets that are going through the air.

As a solution to these challenges, SD-WAN offers intelligent routing and bandwidth optimization that enhances the network capabilities of businesses keen on offering high-quality IT services.

Abstract Tuning Methods for SD-WAN

Tweaking your SD-WAN settings can yield noticeable latency improvements and bandwidth optimization. Here are some strategies:

• Dynamic Path Selection: An important feature of SD-WAN – traffic is routed in real-time based on network conditions. SD-WAN selects the best-performing route for each packet of data delivered, improving latency and alleviating overutilized links.
• Application Specific Policies: This feature can identify different applications and apply policies as required based on the type of application to make sure all the critical apps get necessary bandwidth, and low latency paths, etc. An example will be forwarding the network traffic from VoIP calls and video conferencing before those of email.
• WAN Optimization: Technologies such as data de-duplication, compression, or caching are able to limit the amount of information being transmitted over a network enabling more bandwidth and lower latency.
• QoS (Quality of Service): Creation and enforcement of QoS policies for traffic prioritization. Priority can be given to packets that are time-sensitive thus guaranteeing critical applications will run with little or no degradation in performance even if the network is congested.
• Link Aggregation: Multiple links (MPLS, Broadband, LTE) are connected and act as a single logical connection that can give more bandwidth with redundancy so as not to get congested as well as fail over high availability.
• Advanced Analytics: SD-WAN solutions give you deep insights to improve network performance using analytics tools. This is often done by network traffic pattern monitoring and analysis which allows administrators to determine where tweaks can be made in order to bring improvement, whether it’s latency or bandwidth usage.

Case Studies

Case Study 1: Financial Services Firm

The latency issues in its trading applications were crippling operations at a New York-based financial services firm. They were pirating a few firewalls, servers, and routers that they had ordered but during trading hours the network was lagging behind. When they rolled out SD-WAN with dynamic path selection and application-aware policies, their latencies dropped by 40%. It helped to improve performance and customer satisfaction by giving the most important trading applications proper resources.

Case Study 2: Healthcare Provider

Our last network challenge was faced by a healthcare provider with locations across multiple states. Though they were leasing network hardware, the bandwidth was underutilised accounting for slow application performance and causing delays in emergency telemedicine services. After optimizing their WAN with SD-WAN settings, along with fine-tuning the internet routing policy and implementing QoS network policies at each location, they realized a 30% increase in bandwidth utilization (lowering overall ISP costs) while reducing latency to key applications by up to 25%. This gave healthcare professionals the ability to provide uninterrupted and timely services in patient care.

Case Study 3: An E-commerce Company

A global e-commerce company started experiencing challenges around high latency and inconsistent application performance. Their network involved various rented servers and routers, which would be unable to provide the right performance for high traffic loads that arise during sales promotions. Slyngshot was able to integrate link aggregation and SD-WAN with advanced analytics, allowing them to deal with a 50% increase in traffic without any slowdowns. Using link aggregation to achieve required bandwidth and real-time routing path modification through analytics ensured low latency with peak application performance throughout critical sales periods.

Conclusion

Making adjustments to SD-WAN settings has a meaningful impact as it results in minimized latency, efficient bandwidth utilization, and improved network performance. Many businesses rent core network devices such as firewalls, servers, and routers; by fine-tuning SD-WAN settings to ensure more efficient use of these resources, it provides a solution. The use of dynamic path selection, application-aware policies, WAN optimization, Quality of Service, as well as link aggregation and advanced analytics, helps organizations build more flexible networks offering top performance. As shown by the case studies, even a few of those measurable benefits help with getting more performance and creating a better user experience in applications that drive your business.

Enterprises, by leveraging these fine-tuning strategies, can effectively overcome network latency challenges and will be able to utilize their bandwidth more optimally for consistent and reliable performance. This is the kind of optimization that you need to be thinking about so that your little corner in the digital world can still stand a chance, especially since nothing really moves without speed and efficiency anymore.