When I started my career in networking  (longer ago than I care to admit), the industry was struggling with incompatible systems at the protocol and interface level. As a budding young engineer concerned with ordering a chaotic technosphere, the OSI model seemed like just the remedy. That was an era where innovation moved a lot more slowly. Today, when innovation is advancing at the pace of business, we need to use software and systems to innovate, just like we do with protocols. System APIs and orchestration allow us to build bigger systems, connecting to more things and do translations when needed to bridge gaps protocol standardization hasn’t caught to up yet or may never. This is what webscale is all about.

SDWAN is one of those system technologies that can be used to bridge the gaps to the multi-cloud network. The SDWAN fabric is the perfect unified method to access the multi-cloud, IaaS and SaaS. There are key benefits to attaching multi-cloud sites directly onto the SDWAN fabric.

Today, through cloud APIs, we can orchestrate SDWAN access to different cloud providers, deploy posture-based network security as well as provide optimal multi-path access, traffic engineering and application awareness to Enterprise workloads, wherever they may be. All this in addition to traditional branch and private data center connectivity. Having a single access method – SDWAN – to the myriad of new endpoints, with the ability to policy user, network and security policies in a consistent way across the network is a critical operational benefit. Its speeds rollout of new users and applications, is less error-prone, more secure and makes for much easier troubleshooting and maintenance.

SDWAN 2.0 architecture makes all this possible. In ONUG, users and vendors are working together to help unify and bridge the multi-cloud gap through common API definitions, SDWAN interworking and orchestration. Come join the IT working groups and be a part of it!