What is WAN failover?

Why is WAN failover important?

The corporate WAN is an essential component of daily business operations for many organizations. It plays a key role in how employees work and communicate, provide services to customers, and access corporate resources, making the availability and reliability of the network critical. Network downtime means user frustration, lost productivity, and decreased revenue. Even a short interruption can have significant impacts—disrupting VoIP calls, application sessions, virtual desktop sessions, data backups, large file transfers, and other key activities.

WAN failover can prevent network disruptions and downtime by transferring traffic from a degraded or failed connection to a redundant network component, but traditional failover solutions rely on broadband paths kept in reserve in case an MPLS link fails. This is not ideal for a number of reasons: failover can be slow, bandwidth kept in reserve is wasted and the performance of critical apps will be degraded after the failover event. Newer solutions utilizing software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) technology provide enhanced failover performance without the need for physical routers or other additional hardware by intelligently rerouting traffic along the next-best available paths. In many scenarios, failover can be automated to ensure continuous availability and provide a seamless, undetectable experience for users and customers with no need to restart, reconnect, or log in to applications again.