At face value, the Software-Defined Wide Area Network is a packaged information technology solution for organizations with multiple branch locations. But a boost from the latest cloud technology is revealing SD-WAN’s hidden talents, and it may even attract new customers by accidentally solving the multicloud management snafu.

With cloud, SD-WAN becomes more than just a network solution for banks and retailers to connect their locations. In addition to multicloud management, SD-WAN can aid Internet of Things device management and big data analytics, according to proponents.

These features make SD-WAN increasingly attractive to enterprise users. Gartner Inc. researchers predicted that enterprise adoption will rocket from 2015’s one percent to 30 percent in 2019. (Other reports are even more generous.)

Indeed, industry analysts are increasingly drumming up interest in SD-WAN’s ability to manage traffic across multiple on-premises or cloud environments. “What SD-WAN does is it builds an overlay over the Internet,” said GlobalData Plc Research Director Mike Fratto, in a statement to sdxcentral.com. Users can place a virtualized network gateway in an Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud instance with no manual routing, he explained. “Because it’s an overlay, it just becomes easier to manage traffic,” Fratto stated.

“A lot of the simplicity, the policy-based approach that you see in other parts of cloud infrastructure can now be applied to networking,” said Paul O’Farrell, senior vice president and general manager of Riverbed Technology Inc.’s Steelhead and SteelFusion business unit. SD-WAN is maturing into “cloud networking” or “application-aware networks,” he said.

O’Farrell, along with other Riverbed execs, met with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during a special event at theCUBE’s Palo Alto studio in California. They discussed the impact of SD-WAN in multicloud, IoT and big data.

Riverbed has decided to officially marry SD-WAN with cloud in its SteelConnect SD-WAN solution with integrated cloud connectivity. The company said this is the “first and only product to unify network connectivity and orchestration of application delivery across hybrid WANs, remote LANs and cloud networks with a complete line of WAN gateways, LAN switches, and Wi-Fi access points managed centrally from a cloud console.”

Some young-gun SD-WAN vendors are basing their entire business model around cloud. Mountain View, California-based startup VeloCloud Networks Inc. promises “cloud-delivered SD-WAN in just four minutes.” Network legacy of record Cisco Systems Inc. had previously invested in VeloCloud. Then last May it bought a VeloCloud competitor, cloud-based SD-WAN provider Viptela Inc.

“Acquiring Viptela will enable us to expand our portfolio, with increased functionality delivered through the cloud,” said Rob Salvagno, head of corporate development and Cisco investments at Cisco Systems. But Cisco’s somewhat frantic reaches into SD-WAN betray a company “trying to buy its way into a new market,” O’Farrell said.

SD-WAN’s accidental multicloud play

Any of these companies could gain an advantage by serving the best multicloud management side with their SD-WAN. Private, public and software-as-a-service clouds are proliferating in proportion to the market’s hunger for a single pane of glass to manage all of them. The idea of a combined, cohesive “multicloud” belies the fact that “they’re using different clouds to meet different needs at different times,” said  William Fellows, founder and vice president of research at The 451 Group LLC. With real interoperability lacking, the most realistic hope now may be a console on which clouds appear to interoperate.

Could SD-WAN be the foundation of a workable multicloud solution?

“With the right SD-WAN philosophy, there is no difference between a branch, a laptop at a hotel, a data center, Azure or Google or Amazon,” said Riverbed Chief Technology Officer Hansang Bae. All are simply connectivity points along the larger network fabric, he explained. SteelConnect’s SD-WAN with cloud connection provides a management pane for viewing and programming the network. That means that all those points — including the different clouds and their activities — are visible there. This effectively makes it suitable for multicloud management, according to Bae.

SD-WAN renders network traffic both visible and steerable, making it helpful in IoT — another endeavor that is easier in concept than reality. Sixty percent of IT and business professionals say their IoT initiatives are more difficult to execute than they initially expected. Inability to monitor chaotic IoT traffic on their networks may be part of the problem. SD-WAN allows users to segment the network into “lanes”  — for instance, IoT lanes — and determine what traffic flows through. They can view the activity in the lanes and reconfigure them.

“It can be time-based, it can be user-based. It’s not just a static configuration, it’s very, very fluid,” Bae said.

SD-WAN can also provision lanes for individual users — for instance, within a company. “If you have some developers that are working on an app, and they’re using infrastructure-as-a-service as part of their work, they can do that from whichever remote office they’re sitting at,” said Joshua Dobies, vice president of product marketing at Riverbed. Those users would get “clearance,” so their data wouldn’t need to be back-hauled to the data center; it could flow direct to the cloud.

“This is application-defined networking in action,” Dobies said.

SD-WAN’s data visibility is of obvious interest to data scientists and business people as well. Riverbed acquired wireless network provider Xirrus Inc. last April. The company has worked to assimilate Wi-Fi capabilities into its SD-WAN, since many organizations and individuals prefer Wi-Fi access now.

Wi-Fi use in locations such as retail stores can have rich data analytics and business intelligence uses, according to Bruce Miller, vice president of product marketing at Xirrus. “We know who’s on the network. We know what they’re doing, what applications they’re going to. We know where they are, because we actually calculate the location,” he said.

To watch the complete video interviews, visit the event page (registration required). (* Disclosure: Riverbed Technology Inc. sponsored this segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Riverbed Technology nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

 Photo: SiliconANGLE