When planning for an SD-WAN, I like to start with these ten questions to determine my high-level design and initial implementation strategy. This is just scratching the surface, but it helps me get moving with an actual design and migration strategy.
The conversation around these questions help me to figure out which SD-WAN solution is best, which hardware to go with, what sort of licensing to use, what the topology should look like, and even what the actual policies should be.
This is by no means an exhaustive list but more a conversation starter. If you have any initial planning questions or considerations you think should be on this list, please let me know in the comments, on Twitter, or on LinkedIn.
In my very earliest planning discussions with my customers, I like to ask these 10 questions:
1) What real-time applications are in use?
2) What are the latency thresholds for mission critical apps?
3) Is there a need for multicast?
4) Are there analog connections like PRIs, voice gateways
using analog circuits for failover, etc
5) How will SIP trunk terminations work in the the SD-WAN?
6) What is the org’s cloud footprint and future initiative?
7) What SaaS applications are in use?
8) What are the organization’s security requirements both as
as a whole and specifically for branch security?
9) What are the current providers in place and what is
available at each of the branches?
10) How will the new SD-WAN work with the
organization’s Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
plans?
Thanks,
Phil
{networkphil} 
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