WAN infrastructures are highly persistent due to typically enormous investments in their dedicated hardware and management tools. WAN services like MPLS have undoubtedly been beneficial and enduring, but enterprises and IT departments require more flexible and economical solutions to provide employee access to corporate resources and cloud-based applications. SD-WAN promises to fulfill these needs with software-based, cloud-based solutions – running on commercial off-the-shelf hardware platforms – to connect their various branch offices.