People in the IT Business can chat for hours in an alphabet soup of code words that fly over the heads of even some of the technically connected. It’s easy to tune them out (and often a saved migraine). Sometimes, however, it is good to know what all those letters mean. We have moved past the days when tech people did their thing and the rest of us just went on with our lives. In the case of planners in any business, even poets, it is important to know what those tech guys are droning on about, and even ask a few questions occasionally. In the Primer of Basic IT Acronyms, the connection terms LAN, WAN, and SD-WAN are lesson one.
We all use the internet. Every single person in every business is connected. In an office setting each new employee gets a login and email address on the first day. The teen at the fast food counter is connected through the touch screen menu. Think of any industry, enterprise, or organization and it doesn’t take two minutes to find the on-line connection. Your home washing machine will soon need a login.
All of these people and devices are connected through a NETWORK. Network is the “N” in LAN and WAN. All of this relates to your network, how the devices in it, and the people who use them are connected.
LAN stands for LOCAL AREA NETWORK. Long ago, about 2005, wires characterized LANs. You had a LAN if every computer on your network was connected with Ethernet cables (or in the case of AppleTalk, telephone extension wires). In the dark ages, before 1995, there were LANs that did not connect beyond the rooms or building where they were housed. They mostly required software and hardware. Those of us old enough to have been there still remember wanting to punch the Novell NetWare guy when he claimed, “Everything is working just like it should.” Those early LANs allowed printer sharing, local file sharing, limited messaging, and nothing else.
LANs have changed. Now the Local in LAN really is a designation of proximity and access. Your Wi-Fi network at home is a LAN. Now LANs can also be much, much bigger. The entire campus of a university might be a single LAN. They share a common connection, be it wired, wireless or a combination of both. The limit is really who owns and manages the connection. When all of the connection made inside the LAN have a single owner and manager, and they share a pipe, and you have a LAN.
There is some grey area here, which should be fine with the poets. WAN stand for WIDE AREA NETWORK. A WAN can seem a lot like a LAN. Theoretically, a LAN could be bigger than a WAN. The difference is, a WAN goes outside of the local channels and makes connections through other flowing streams. If a business has offices in three countries, they will need to go through public connection channels to maintain a network between their distant local networks.
To over simplify, a LAN is a building with only one or two well-guarded doors. The visitors are only allowed inside after they are checked at the door. Once inside, they can move around freely and don’t need another ID check. A WAN is a far more public building. There are people from all over moving through it at any one time, but only those with the right name tag can get through certain doors. WANs are inherently less secure, and because of all the ID checking, data moves less efficiently through a WAN. Your ISP (Internet Service Provider; for the poets: Comcast, Time Warner, Charter) is really just a gargantuan WAN connecting you to the Granddaddy of all WANs, the internet.
Since they are so complicated, WANs were usually property of an outside vendor or required propriety hardware. Some major player will have a WAN comprised of leased, private lines spanning continents. If Friendly Bank wanted to connect its 400 branches in three states it had to pay monthly for dedicated lines through Mega Telecom and/or lease hardware from WANs-r-Us. The management of those WANs also required staff.
An SD-WAN, on the other hand, requires much less third party involvement. SD-WAN stands for SOFTWARE DEFINED-WIDE AREA NETWORK. It is a private, wide connection with the security, routing and connecting done with software using the existing data flow. Even a smaller enterprise with only a few offices can have an SD-WAN to connect their one sales rep in the UK to the main office in Arkansas without having to run a T1 line (really expensive data pipe) to her house. In contrast to a traditional WAN, its software-defined replacement does not rely on a single provider for a connection or hardware. SD-WAN can be much less expensive, much more flexible, and in some case, more reliable.
SD-WAN does not need a specific pipe or channel. It can use whatever pathways are available, even switching between them, and delivering a connection to the user that seems hard wired. Peplink’s Speed Fusion SD-WAN technology will bond together different connections to present a steady flow of data. Speed Fusion will pair a cellular connection, a cable connection, and even a fiber connection, then switch the data from one to the other seamlessly and securely in a way that is completely transparent to the user. The result is a network connection that never goes down.
SD-WAN is a Wide Area Network for any sized organization. Peplink routers have the SD-WAN technology built in. Because it is software based, data flow, management, connections, and control can be centrally managed from one remote location. Peplink has even created an app that will allow a full network to be managed from a smart phone.
You do not have to be an engineer to understand how SD-WAN can give your enterprise a connection advantage. An SD-WAN is relatively simple, flexible, and inexpensive to implement and maintain. With the range of solutions from Peplink, SD-WAN is easily available. Even Poets need to be connected.
Frontier Computer Corp. is the largest stocking distributor of Peplink SD-WAN solutions. Our engineers can help you create an SD-WAN for your clients. We cannot help you with a tricky sonnet.
Contact FrontierUS at 866.226.6344.
Frontier Computer Corp. is a leader in providing IT solutions worldwide.
