How to backup to the cloud with a WAN data acceleration layer

Software-Defined WANs (SD-WANs) are, along with artificial intelligence, the talk of the town, but they have their limitations for fast cloud back-up and restore. However, before SD-WANs organisations had to cope with conventional wide area networks – just plain old WANs – with all applications, bandwidth congestion and heavy quality of service (QoS) going through one pipe using multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) to connect each branch office to one or more clouds. The advent of the SD-WAN was a step forward to a certain extent, allowing branch offices to be connected to wireless WANs, the internet, private MPLS, cloud services and to an enterprise data centre using a number of connections. In essence, SD-WANs are great for midsized WAN bandwidth applications with their ability to pull disparate WAN connections together under a single software- managed WAN. Yet, they don’t sufficiently resolve latency and packet loss issues. This means that any performance gains are, again, usually due to inbuilt deduplication techniques.