Introduction: The Smart Highway
In the past, branch offices bought incredibly expensive 'MPLS' dedicated cables to ensure their traffic safely reached the main headquarters. Today, companies use standard broadband coupled with an SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network). It is a smart router that uses software to manage multiple cheap internet connections as if they were a premium cable.
The Dynamic Pathing
An SD-WAN router monitors the latency and 'packet loss' of every connection it has. If the primary Fiber connection gets a little bit slow, the SD-WAN instantly (and silently) moves a Zoom call's IP traffic over to the backup 5G connection to prevent the video from lagging.
Conclusion
SD-WAN brings the 'Brain' of the cloud to the physical router. It ensures maximum uptime by constantly shifting IPs across the healthiest paths. Auditing your connection path here.