Why Software-Defined Networking Is Ideal for Cloud and Hybrid Environments

Very few companies can boast about having products deep in the ocean and in outer space. And it’s a good bet that just one of these businesses has been in operation for more than 70 years.

That singular distinction goes to Milwaukee Electronics, a longtime designer and manufacturer of innovative printed circuit board assemblies. Founded in 1954, the company has supplied critical components for everything from undersea cameras to robotic vehicles for exploring 
distant planets.

The company’s success, says Justin Moulton, vice president of operations and technology, depends first and foremost on its employees, who work in facilities in the U.S., Mexico and Asia.

It also depends on the quality of the connections those employees rely on. And until recently, consistency was a challenge.

“Randomly, about once a week, one of our three plants would go offline,” Moulton explains. “It had become a normal part of business for an entire facility to be unable to communicate with our other locations or our main data center.”

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The company had been relying on a traditional software-defined WAN solution it managed on-premises with dedicated physical appliances.

The technology allowed its various LANs to connect with one another and share data, and it enabled its hybrid workforce to log in from anywhere through a VPN.

But the frequent disruptions convinced Moulton and Kyle Frank, the company’s senior IT and cybersecurity manager, that it was time to modernize. The two reached out to a network engineer who had helped them with previous projects. On his advice, they replaced their failing edge infrastructure with Cisco Meraki MX SD-WAN appliances.

“The issue wasn’t SD-WAN,” Frank says. “It was the edge devices we were using at each site.”

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The company’s previous networking and security technologies could only be managed through multiple interfaces; now they can be controlled using Meraki tools accessed on a single dashboard. “Everything is cloud-driven, with a web page and user interface that anybody can understand,” Frank says.

Today, Milwaukee Electronics has a network that it trusts to provide business continuity, and the costly outages that plagued the company are a thing of the past. That reliability, along with new unified network management capabilities, has meant that the IT team can focus on other things

“At the end of the day, we want to put our dollars on the production floor, not into IT,” Moulton says. “This is an elegant solution that allows us to work more efficiently.”

Why SD-WAN Is The Networking Solution of Choice

The last thing any IT team wants to do is worry about the health of its network infrastructure. When a system goes down, that affects business — and it negatively impacts the end-user experience.

“It’s extremely frustrating,” Moulton notes. “It’s not where you want to be devoting your resources.”

The good news for companies such as Milwaukee Electronics is that networking technologies are rapidly evolving. Both SD-WAN and wireless LAN implementations are increasingly managed using AI-driven platforms, for example, and secure access service edge solutions are adding value to modern networking deployments.

“SD-WAN in particular is something we’ve seen develop significantly over the past handful of years,” says Brandon Butler, a research manager in the enterprise networking division at IDC. The technology improves application performance and efficiency by separating a network’s software-based control plane from its underlying hardware, he explains. Companies turn to SD-WAN to easily link multiple business locations and because it allows them to leverage the internet connection of their choice.

Both were key reasons for the technology’s adoption at Blue Diamond Growers in California. An agricultural cooperative and marketing company representing nearly 3,000 almond growers, Blue Diamond has relied on HPE Aruba Networking (formerly Silver Peak) EdgeConnect SD-WAN for seven years.

“A big driver for us was the cost savings,” says Ryan Funk, the organization’s director of IT infrastructure. “It allowed us to get rid of the expensive MPLS connections we used to have between our facilities and our office space, and instead use regular broadband circuits to build our own private network across all locations.”

The Aruba technology also includes WAN optimization tools that ensure the company’s network is always operating at maximum capacity. For example, should a connection go down between a plant and Blue Diamond’s Sacramento headquarters, the system will just adapt automatically “and take a different route,” Funk explains.

Today, Blue Diamond uses SD-WAN in combination with HPE Aruba Networking Central. The cloud-based platform leverages artificial intelligence to streamline network management for Funk and his team. “We have more visibility and better reliability,” he says. “It’s really a great position to be in. Everything works.”

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Why Cloud Migrations Lead to SD-WAN

Another business that’s positioned for success due in part to its better network is Bush Brothers. Best known for its canned baked beans, the company has four locations across Arkansas, Tennessee and Wisconsin.

In its case, notes infrastructure and security manager Ron Grohman, SD-WAN became the logical choice once the company started moving to the cloud. “A lot of the vendors for the technologies we use to run production and ship product were adopting the Software as a Service model,” he recalls. “We had to make sure they had the same resiliency and availability as they did when everything was inside our four walls.”

The company had traditional WAN connectivity at the time, with hardware that Grohman and his team managed onsite at each facility. Network outages had become all too common.

“Whenever we had a problem, I’d have to physically go change the routing to bring up a backup connection,” Grohman recalls. “SD-WAN offered a way to make that seamless and completely automated.”

Like Moulton and Frank at Milwaukee Electronics, Grohman opted to deploy a Cisco solution. He ultimately went with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, an on-premises technology with integrated security and multicloud capabilities that he deployed along with Cisco industrial Ethernet switches.

Access control and policy enforcement for the network is made possible with help from Cisco Identity Services Engine, Grohman says. Overall, the solution has helped his team keep network downtime to a minimum even as the company has grown substantially, adding significantly to its fleet of manufacturing equipment. “We can let people keep piling on stuff because we’re no longer working with a single connection,” he explains. “Instead, we might have six or more paths we can use to optimize the network as needed.”

Grohman says he used to field calls from frustrated employees -complaining about poor network performance. Now, he can’t remember the last time he had to deal with a connectivity issue. “I’d call that a measurable improvement,” he says. “Our people are happy with the network we have today."