First of all Happy New Year folks, to a great 2018! I’m starting the year with the last post in this series on SteelConnect, and to start the year on an easy note this is a short one about the SteelHead-SD platform.

The SteelHead-SD combines the best of both worlds: it provides you with all the SD-WAN goodness that SteelConnect has to offer as well as provide the application performance gains that a SteelHead is famous for, all in one converged package.

We’re nearing the end of the series, today I’ll cover the RESTful API which can be used to integrate certain tasks into your existing infrastructure management solution, or just use it to monitor or update only the parts that are relevant to your organisation.

SD-WAN is a great enabler for many businesses, allowing them to improve the management of the infrastructure as well as improving user experience and application performance.

One thing I haven’t covered much in the series is performance and application visibility and how SteelConnect provides provides detailed insight. It allows filtering on user, location, application, uplink or device for example.

The previous blog posts were more focused on the WAN side of SD-WAN, not surprising I guess. This one is more geared towards the faster side of a gateway: the LAN.

SteelConnect isn’t just for zero-touch provisioning (ZTP) your WAN or cloud gateways, it also has the capability to do the same for access points and switches and potentially manage a complete network from a cloud portal.

Many organisations have moved workloads to the cloud, or are using SaaS applications like Office 365, Google Apps and others. When moving to these applications, the implications of the required bandwidth (and additional latency) are often overlooked, resulting in a poor user experience especially when the internet traffic is first being backhauled to a data centre, then out to the internet.

In part 3 of the series I’ll talk about everyone’s favourite subject: cloud! That word alone should surely boost the SEO for this blog…

Jokes aside, this part is about the capabilities of easily extending your on-prem network to the cloud, using SteelConnect.