What You Gain with SD-WAN technology
As a virtualized WAN architecture, SD-WANs allow enterprises to use numerous different transport mechanisms, including LTE, MPLS, and broadband Internet connections. Ultimately, SD-WANs can leverage all of those different connectivity methodologies to connect users to applications.
SD-WANs also introduce centralized management and orchestration, reducing much of the burden associated with managing and provisioning a WAN. That centralized orchestration allows network managers to define policies that can leverage the full power of the connectivity services used. Take for example link-load balancing. Here the SD-WAN policy can be defined to combine multiple internet connections in active/active to act as a larger transport pipe, increasing throughput.
The ability to load balance traffic across multiple pipes brings additional advantages, such as automatically incorporating redundancy into the WAN topology and supporting the concept of automatic failover. Simply put, if any one link fails, traffic will be routed over another link to maintain connectivity.