Migrating to Cisco SD-WAN: What to Expect and How to Prepare
SD-WAN promises lower costs, better performance, and simplified management. But a poorly planned migration can leave you with degraded connectivity and frustrated users. Here's how we approach it.
Cisco SD-WAN (formerly Viptela) has matured into one of the most capable enterprise WAN platforms available. The promise is real: centralized policy management, application-aware routing, built-in security, and significant cost savings over legacy MPLS circuits. But the migration path from a traditional WAN to SD-WAN is rarely as smooth as vendor presentations suggest.
The most common pitfall we see is underestimating the dependency mapping phase. Before you touch a single router, you need a complete picture of what's running over your WAN — not just the obvious stuff like ERP and VoIP, but the legacy applications, backup jobs, and monitoring agents that nobody documented. Surprises in production are expensive.
Our SD-WAN migration methodology starts with a current-state assessment: traffic analysis, application inventory, circuit performance baselining, and a review of your existing QoS policies. From there we design the target architecture — vManage topology, vSmart controller placement, data plane sizing — and build a phased cutover plan that minimizes risk at each step.
We also pay close attention to the security integration story. SD-WAN doesn't replace your firewall — it complements it. For clients running Palo Alto NGFWs, we design the integration so that SD-WAN handles path selection and application routing while the firewall handles threat inspection and policy enforcement. The result is a WAN that's both smarter and more secure.
Advent Networks
Certified IT consultants specializing in Palo Alto NGFW, Cisco, and enterprise network design — Boston, MA.
Need help with your network?
Our certified engineers are ready to assess your environment and build a plan that works.
Book a Free Consultation