Appearing on nextgov.com, by Don Parente, MetTel VP of Federal Sales & Solution Architecture:
Software defined wide area networking of SD-WAN offers a revolutionary architecture that provides secure, powerful connectivity to multiple or many sites or branches, using lower cost bandwidth options such as dedicated internet or broadband. It uses a centralized control plane to route traffic, allowing administrators to write rules and policies and deploy them across the entire network at once. Control is detached from the underlying network, simplifying network management and improving cost, while maintaining high levels of performance. It also makes it easy to take any access technology and incorporate it into the network. For example, SD-WAN allows endpoints served by Starlink to be easily and securely integrated into an enterprise WAN. SD-WAN also does a great job load balancing across all available access circuits serving a given location.
The good news is that federal agencies can replace their expensive MPLS WAN environment with multiple broadband carriers per location and let the SD-WAN magic boxes balance traffic across the multiple low-cost paths.