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The speed of digital transformation among businesses demands that WAN architectures change to meet growing challenges. Needs like increasing cloud usage and growing bandwidth requirements mean that your company is likely seeking ways to simplify your WAN to meet these increasing demands. 

Future-proofing means less replacing, less repairing, and a lot less cost down the line as we scramble to be ready for tomorrow. The future, however, is vague, and knowing what to prepare for can be difficult. Make sure your wide-area network (WAN) is ready for tomorrow with a few fairly simple measures right now.

Software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) has fundamentally changed networking technology in a host of ways. It's changed so much, in fact, that some think WAN optimization itself is a dead art, lost forever against the greater efficiency of SD-WAN. That's not strictly true, but not too far off. There are still ways to optimize a WAN, thanks in large part to SD-WAN itself.

Is it time to get rid of the wide-area network (WAN)? Some would say it is, but almost as many would say that it's just time for a better WAN. Making a WAN better calls for some fairly serious changes, but those changes can make the system more ready to take on the ever-increasing demands of modern business.

While IT departments must work to provide wide-area network (WAN) operations to solve today's needs, the most astute are considering tomorrow's needs as well. That's got more than a few thinking about how to address those future needs, and what the WAN of tomorrow will look like.

• Increased scalability. With WAN and cloud systems working together, there's a better ability to take advantage of collocations and remote operations. Small and medium-sized business (SMB) users are particularly interested in this phenomenon, and more and more, the larger data center is pretty much a province of large-scale operations.
• New app options. With increasing cloud-based options coming available, that means new apps available on every front. Using WAN to tap into those new apps opens up options ranging from big data analysis to customer relationship management (CRM) tools and more.

• Greater demand for security. With all this data flowing through a system, and more points than ever requiring access, the data prizes are richer and the means of access that much easier. A greater demand for security therefore, naturally follows.
• Capacity management is almost as vital. New data is likely to stretch demand for bandwidth to a fever pitch. Trying to keep capacity straight will be vital to ensure the network can handle all the demands placed on it, making capacity management crucial. 

Before the cloud brought about software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN), but after frame relay stopped being the standardized WAN technology, most enterprises used multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) to connect to their WAN. MPLS is still the most popular form of WAN connectivity today, but with data- intensive applications on the rise this may be changing.