SD-WAN Service Portal - Nuage Networks

The SD-WAN Service Portal delivers the visibility and control needed to achieve complete management of the SD-WAN service via an intuitive user interface that puts the right information front and center for both fully managed and co-managed SD-WAN services.

Challenges

Enterprises are deploying SD-WANs as the key technology to improve the visibility and control of their wide area networks.

Challenge 1: Visibility

For too long WAN management has been stuck at the routing layer of the network; providing the service management and enterprise customers a wealth of semi-precious reporting data of the bits and bytes in and out of a location. Semi-precious because it provided network data on the amount of bandwidth used at a location but held little business value as there was no visibility into the application usage by user at the branch.

This made troubleshooting application performance next to impossible with most complaints starting from the viewpoint of “The network is slow today”, and the network team having to base their diagnostics based on the premise of guilty until proven innocent.

Change 2: Control

One of the biggest challenges for the Enterprise with their traditional managed VPN service was the inability to make swift changes to their network service to match any immediate changes to their business environments.

Generally, any change to the WAN required a formal interaction with their Service Provider, and that request needing to go through a formal change control process, with multiple interactions across multiple provider and customer teams to schedule and implement the change.

This meant that the network team in the Enterprise would be constantly on the back foot reacting to the change and having to factor in the time and effort that any change to the WAN would require before the new business initiative could be operationalized.

Solution

The Nuage Networks SD-WAN portal is a key tool in delivering the visibility and control of an Enterprises managed SD-WAN service. With its intuitive user interface (UI) built though a comprehensive and iterative UX process the portal delivers the service functionality and business visibility needed for the deployment of today’s fully managed and co-managed SD-WAN services.

Built on a foundation of multi-tenancy and fine-grained user profiling the SD-WAN portal delivers the visibility and control that both the CSP service and operations teams need to manage multiple SD-WAN services. For co-managed SD-WAN services where the CSP operates the SD-WAN service and the Enterprise customer has inputs into the moves, adds and changes of their individual SD-WAN service the portal shines.

Enterprises are presented with a real-time view into the current and historical performance of their WAN. From there they can, through user-based permissions, make application level changes to ensure that the WAN delivers the per-application performance that the business requires.

Fine Grain Access Control and Service Branding

The SD-WAN portal is fully customizable platform offering fine grained access control for service provider and enterprise users through customer profiles.

It provides a secure hierarchical multi-tenancy model enabling managed SD-WAN providers to deliver to direct Enterprise retail services or via wholesale channel partners to their customers.
Through the customized multi-tenant hierarchy individual SD-WAN services can be customized to offer as much visibility and control as the enterprise requires.

Network, Branch and Cloud Management

SD-WAN portal provides full lifecycle service fulfillment through an intuitive and granular user UI.

SD-WAN L2 and L3 overlay paths can be established to physical or virtual (cloud) locations or networks along with prescribed QoS, security and application policies.

New branch locations can be pre-provisioned in the portal, and the activation process initiated in advance of the enterprise receiving their SD-WAN appliance.

Network and Application Visualization

SD-WAN portal provides intuitive dashboards empowering the enterprise users with a real-time understanding of the network traffic and application performance from all points in their managed SD-WAN service including at the overall WAN (inter-branch) and specific branch levels.

This insight informs the user of the utilization of the network resources, like bandwidth, and how each application is impacting the branch and wide area performance.

Through the UI, the Service Provider and Enterprise users has full visibility of each application that flows through the network allowing for insight into the top talkers, the impact certain applications have on the network, and how each application performed against the pre-set SLAs including latency, jitter and packet loss. This level of insight provides the enterprise with a deep understanding of the usage of their network, both holistically and on a per branch or cloud connection point which allows them to plan for and implement changes to the network that reflect their business requirements.

Application and Traffic Control

The SD-WAN portal enables both the Service Provider and Enterprise user to establish policies to ensure that each application receives the correct network performance based on its importance to the business. Policies such as Application Aware Routing (AAR) can be established to ensure that each application meets their required SLAs by selecting the best performing uplink. And with the portal providing both visibility into historical and current performance, and on the fly customer driven policy changes, the SD-WAN service will always meet the needs of the business.

Additionally, through the portal, security policies can be established for each application or group of applications (for instance ‘business communications’ or ‘general internet’) to protect the network and the resources the application consumes against malicious security attacks.