Will SD WAN replace MPLS?

MPLS will remain a component of hybrid WAN architecture, but SD WAN is and will be and is the primary choice for most organizations. In the minds of most IT decision-makers, SD WAN has now firmly replaced MPLS to meet the needs of almost all Enterprise use cases.

The main reason is that users require access to cloud applications (connected to the Internet) from multiple devices, including laptops, phones and tablets. In addition, SD WAN offers significant capability upgrades, including traffic steering, ease of deployment and management with detailed, easy-to-read reporting.

MPLS does offer comprehensive SLA's (which include latency and jitter) with guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) and Service Level Agreements. With this said, SD WAN offers several advantages over MPLS, such as increased flexibility, application visibility, traffic steering, dynamic routing, and cost reduction. And because of these facts, most organisations have implemented SD WAN as a replacement for costs MPLS networks.

In hybrid networks, MPLS can meet the needs of selected use cases, such as connecting data centres via layer 2.