Why service providers and vendors are tuning up home-based SD-WAN services

by Mike Robuck

With millions of employees now working from home, service providers are looking for ways to offer more secure, manageable services into those home offices. SD-WAN could emerge as a prime technology that better enables work-from-home (WFH) and work-from-anywhere (WFA) scenarios for enterprises.

In short, home-based SD-WAN is doable, but it may not look like current SD-WAN offerings.

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World Wide Technology's Neil Anderson, senior director of network solutions, previously said he expected 30% to 40% of the employees currently working from home would not go back to their office spaces.

Anderson said there are several key tenets of the current SD-WAN offerings that he didn't think would apply to a home office environment. But having a wireless router with programmable, SDN-based software that can be easily managed on an SD-WAN service would benefit WFH employees.

"It would be very easy to manage thousands of home offices that way," Anderson said. "When you think of SD-WAN, you think about multiple connections and load balancing, or making sure an application can swing from one connection to another. I'm not sure you'll see a lot of that in home offices. Maybe in executives' homes. Maybe if you do have permanent call centers. Maybe if you do insist that people have more than one broadband connection in case something happens.

"I'm not sure that people will do that right away. But I definitely think that there are benefits from SD-WAN that could manage the performance of that application, give you some visibility of what's going on, and just the ease the management."