Why IoT needs SD-WAN connectivity

The Internet of Things is rapidly expanding it's reach. Soon there will be few devices untouched by this movement in connectivity. How can these devices achieve critical performance across a public Internet?

SD-WAN may have the answer.

Separate technologies

The Internet of Things has been a long time in the making. As devices get smaller and more powerful, natural progression and evolution of computing has led to this embedded device explosion. Different flavors of SD-WAN have also been around for a while but have started to mature into a mainstream product.

IoT and SD-WAN never had one another in mind when they were conceptualized, but now the two technologies are finally coming of age.

So what makes them complimentary?

Complimentary technologies

SD-WAN may just be IoT's new best friend. Many of the devices that are starting to make up the Internet of Things not only need to talk to a central server, but also to each other. Traditional ways of connecting remote locations such as MPLS and IPSec VPN alone, won't cut it. The technologies by themselves are too cumbersome, slow and unreliable for real-time applications.

Enterprise IoT requires real-time, low latency connectivity with very little downtime, and preferably, the ability to scale quickly.

SD-WAN perfectly fits the bill.

SD-WAN's time to shine

By enabling a software-defined overlay network, all of the aforementioned issues are resolved; the connection is persistent and failures are reconnected by the cloud automatically, no advanced configuration is necessary.

A great example of a typical M2M (Machine to Machine) IoT user would be a company with distributed kiosks, IP cameras, and Point-of-Sale stations that uses a cloud data center to process the big data generated by all of these devices.

The network is likely to utilize multiple WAN interfaces. The headquarters could be connected to an MPLS network, while the IoT devices utilize a combination of LTE and WIFI connected through multiple vendors depending on geographic location.

Implementing an SD-WAN overlay creates a single management interface and integrates all of the WAN connections into one reliable, redundant, manageable and highly scale-able interface without all the work.

Solutions for IoT & beyond

In summary, SD-WAN creates a more efficient traffic flow between offices, IoT devices and data centers, while maintaining security and fluid scalability.

An SD-WAN solution can not only simplify your M2M IoT network applications, but branch office connectivity as well.

Resources

Embrey, Bryan. “SDN and SD-WAN Solution Examples for M2M-IoT Applications.” Cradlepoint, 6 Dec. 2016, cradlepoint.com/blog/bembrey/sdn-and-sd-wan-solution-examples-m2m-iot-applications.

Vesneski, Erik. “Creating a Smart City Living Lab.” WWT, World Wide Technology, 4 Mar. 2020, www.wwt.com/article/creating-smart-city-living-lab.