The old adage “the devil is in the details” certainly reigns true in IT. From the most tenured of IT professionals to the newbies just out of college, the obvious answer to overcoming and preparing for a big change is to develop a thorough and well-documented migration plan.
When migrating your network from one carrier to another, some thought has clearly already gone into the potential impact such a change will have on the organization and how to mitigate risk of disruption to your end-users.
If you aren’t yet comfortable with the idea of migrating to SD-WAN (or even if you are), this article will give a detailed overview of what needs to be considered, requested and fulfilled when building your plan to migrate from MPLS to an SD-WAN controlled internet environment.
Prior to deploying your SD-WAN solution, orders must be placed with the appropriate carrier or carriers to insure you have connectivity to roll off of your existing MPLS internet solution to a dual internet solution. Another best practice is to have both diverse carriers and paths. Diverse technologies ensure redundancy to the internet from the corporate HQ or the remote sites.
After you’ve confirmed diverse connectivity, start by following these steps:
You must know exactly what you have in order to replace it, so it’s important to conduct a thorough inventory of the services, equipment and IP addressing schemes you will need.
Keep in mind that the role of SD-WAN in this environment is to centralize the control function so traffic can be directed securely and intelligently across the WAN. That said, your SD-WAN device may physically connect to routers, firewalls, LAN(s) and DMZs.
For this reason, you will need to develop a thorough network diagram as well as create a pre-install document identifying the following by sight:
As you can see, with a plan anything is possible. As a human species, we’ve proven that anything is possible by putting man on the moon and by going to the depths of our ocean floors. Here at EnableIP, our managed SD-WAN solutions allows us to simplify the migration process for businesses of all sizes.
EnableIP is a telecom solutions provider founded by Wired Networks’ founder Jeremy Kerth and head engineer Steve Roos after they realized there was a deep market need for helping mid-size businesses establish better uptime rates for their Wide Area Networks (WANs). Armed with the best-in-class carriers and partners, Jeremy and Steve set out with a bold plan: Guarantee better uptime rates than the industry standard of only 99.5%.Their bold plan became a reality. EnableIP’s solutions guarantee clients 99.99% (even 99.999%) network uptime. But we don’t stop there. Many telecom providers promise high availability network solutions but fail to deliver because they’re in the business of providing services, not solutions.
That’s the EnableIP difference: We deliver highly available networks by providing a complete system (called “Cloud Assurance”) that ensures 99.99% or above uptime.
We deliver this bold promise by:
