Frequently Asked Questions
The network is the digital nervous system of an organization, connecting employees, customers, partners, applications, data, and more. For years, the dominant choice for enterprise WANs was MPLS because of its reliability, security, and guaranteed performance. But MPLS does have some drawbacks, including high cost, inflexibility, and poor cloud integration. The growing demand for agile, cost-effective, and cloud-friendly networking pushed companies to adopt SD-WAN. Specifically, migrating from MPLS to SD-WAN can:
- Deliver cost savings
- Improve application performance
- Simplify management
- Enhance security
SD-WAN has been around for more than a decade, but many organizations have still not made the plunge. As recently as 2022, Greg Bryan, Senior Manager at telecommunications data provider TeleGeography, said:
“Currently, MPLS exceeds SD-WAN, although we expect a considerable shift in the next few years as businesses demand better flexibility, reliability, and cloud access. Moving forward, reliance on MPLS and private access from customer sites to MPLS PoPs will lessen, and we predict that this is likely to have a material impact on the business of selling corporate networks.”
Migrating from MPLS to SD-WAN is a significant undertaking, so it’s no surprise that organizations are loath to rush into it. But the longer you wait, the longer you miss out on the many benefits of SD-WAN.
Pure IP has guided 100+ migrations for clients over the years, and we know what success looks like. Here are 18 lessons we’ve learned along the way that can help you plan a smoother, lower-risk transition and realize the benefits of SD-WAN faster.
18 lessons for your network transformation
Lesson #1: Determine why you’re doing this.
There are many reasons for migrating from MPLS to SD-WAN: reduce costs, increase efficiency, improve performance, enhance security, reduce administrative overhead, and more. Of course, all of these are desirable, but you want to be clear about your primary objectives as you embark on the process. Be specific about required thresholds and benchmarks, defining specific metrics—such as latency, cost, and resilience targets—wherever possible. This will help you make smarter decisions as you plan and execute the migration.
Lesson #2: Perform a business-driven network assessment.
This is not a “lift and shift” project where you simply move your existing network applications and traffic patterns onto the new SD-WAN infrastructure. SD-WAN isn’t just a MPLS replacement. To unlock maximum value, you need to begin with a full inventory of sites, circuits, applications, and performance requirements, and then map those against the objectives identified in the previous step. This ensures your migration plan is grounded not in technical preferences but in business priorities so you can reduce risk while ensuring the SD-WAN design delivers real ROI.
Lesson #3: Ensure executive buy-in for long-term success.
Migrating from MPLS to SD-WAN is more than a network upgrade—it’s a strategic transformation. Executive buy-in is essential to help you secure funding, manage organizational change, and sustain the operational shifts required to reap the long-term benefits of the investment. Again, understanding the business objectives of the initiative are critical to help non-technical leadership understand the role of SD-WAN beyond simply replacing circuits.
Lesson #4: Segment and prioritize applications early.
Not all applications require the same treatment. Some—such as real-time voice and video or customer-facing systems—are more critical from a performance perspective than others. You need to categorize your applications based on business criticality, performance sensitivity, and security needs up front, before migration, so you know which applications need premium treatment. This enables you to set SD-WAN policies, like dynamic path selection and quality of service (QoS), to ensure that critical applications get the right paths, bandwidth, and failover behavior from day one. You don’t want to be fixing performance issues after cutover.
Lesson #5: Plan for hybrid coexistence.
An MPLS to SD-WAN migration rarely happens all at once; expect an interim period where both run in parallel (and in some cases, this could even be the permanent state). For MPLS, broadband, and wireless links to all work together seamlessly during this phase, you need to design for coexistence up front with clear routing policies, traffic steering rules, and consistent visibility. This allows teams to migrate in stages, validate performance, and reduce risk while maintaining business continuity.
Lesson #6: Re-evaluate your security architecture.
MPLS and SD-WAN have different trust models. MPLS networks are private, provider-managed circuits, so trust is largely implicit. But because SD-WAN commonly uses internet, broadband, and wireless links instead of, or alongside, private networks, trust must be explicit. You need stronger encryption, consistent policy enforcement, and tighter integration with cloud and SaaS security controls. Security should be designed into the migration, not bolted on after. You need to reassess firewall placement, segmentation, zero-trust principles, and secure access service edge (SASE) alignment early to ensure that security evolves with connectivity.
New to zero trust? Industry expert Bernard Marr breaks it down:
Lesson #7: Automate and standardize configurations.
One of SD-WAN’s big advantages is the elimination of manual, site-by-site device configuration, which is error-prone and slows deployment. You can use centralized templates and policy-based controls to ensure consistent routing, security, and QoS across all locations, which minimizes human error, reduces configuration drift, and speeds site deployments. Use centralized orchestration and templated policies from the start to avoid having to make a series of one-off network changes and turn migration into a repeatable process.
Lesson #8: Train and align the team.
Migrating from MPLS to SD-WAN requires not just a technical shift, but an operational one as well—and alignment is crucial. Network, security, and operations teams all need a shared understanding of SD-WAN concepts such as policy-based routing, application-aware controls, cloud security, and automation-driven change management. Furthermore, they need to shift away from device-centric management and troubleshooting to a policy-centric approach, so it’s important to clearly define ownership, roles, and workflows. Early training and alignment can reduce friction and set you up to maximize the benefits of SD-WAN long after the migration is complete.
Lesson #9: Test, pilot, and validate.
Your network runs your business, so it’s critical to test and validate the SD-WAN design in real-world conditions before committing to a full rollout. This could include running proofs of concept with live traffic and synthetic monitoring, and running pilots in a small set of sites to verify application performance, failover behavior, security policies, and operational workflows. Such early tests can uncover gaps and surface issues, such as asymmetric routing or application steering mistakes, before you scale.
Lesson #10: Understand your total costs.
SD-WAN can be more cost-effective than MPLS, but you need to be aware of the total costs, which goes beyond circuit pricing. SD-WAN does often lower transport costs, but you need to factor in SD-WAN licenses, SASE subscriptions, monitoring tools, potential circuit upgrades, and management expenses. You want to understand the full cost picture up front to set realistic ROI expectations, avoid budget surprises, and ensure savings don’t come at the expense of performance, security, or resilience.
Lesson #11: Implement routing and QoS best practices.
For SD-WAN to deliver the promised flexibility, routing and QoS must be correctly designed in from the start. You need to establish clear path-selection policies, failover thresholds, and traffic-steering rules based on application priorities and performance requirements. QoS should be applied consistently across underlay links to ensure critical applications get predictable performance without manual tuning required on a site-by-site basis.
Lesson #12: Build in redundancy and failover strategies.
You can build redundancy with traditional MPLS, but it is expensive, often cost-prohibitively so. Migrating to SD-WAN provides the opportunity to design resilience into the WAN. SD-WAN supports active-active use of multiple transports—such as broadband, fiber, and 5G—with intelligent failover based on real-time performance, allowing applications to automatically reroute around degradation or outages. This enables you to maintain uptime and user experience, without manual intervention.
Lesson #13: Understand integration requirements with existing firewalls and cloud services.
SD-WAN embeds security features into its devices and integrates with third-party applications such as firewalls, security platforms, and cloud services. The details depend on whether you’re deploying SD-WAN on its own or with SASE for a unified, cloud-native approach that embeds security natively at the edge. You need to assess whether you want to keep security centralized, move it to the edge, or shift it to cloud-delivered services. In all cases, you must clarify integration requirements early to ensure SD-WAN works seamlessly with current security investments and cloud architectures, and to avoid duplicate tooling, policy conflicts, and visibility gaps.
Lesson #14: Include change-management communication in your plan.
The migration will ultimately affect end users, IT teams, and business stakeholders, so change management is a critical component of SD-WAN migration success—it can’t be an afterthought. Plan for proactive communications about to timelines, expected impacts, and new operational process to set expectations and reduce disruption during rollout. Be sure to clearly explain the “why” behind the change, and demonstrate that the transition is not just a network change but a business improvement, and provide visibility into progress. This will help you build trust and minimize resistance.
Lesson #15: Set realistic timelines and communicate milestones.
Migrating from MPLS to SD-WAN is a complex project with a lot of technical, human, and operational moving parts. Timelines should reflect organizational reality, not just contract dates. You need to factor in assessments, pilots, hybrid coexistence, carrier lead times, training, etc. Creating accountability and communicating milestones clearly along the way keeps stakeholders aligned and progress visible, both of which are crucial for ensuring the complicated, multi-phase migration remains a manageable, well-governed initiative.
Lesson #16: Develop the right performance metrics.
Business objectives were the critical starting point of the project, and they must also flow through to your KPIs after migration. It’s not enough to simply track link utilization or uptime; you need performance metrics that reflect business impact, such as application experience, latency and packet loss thresholds, failover performance, mean time to repair, and user satisfaction. Establish a clear baseline early so you can objectively validate performance during and after migration and ensure the SD-WAN environment continues to deliver value over time.
Lesson #17: Plan for day 2 and beyond.
The work doesn’t end at cutover. Planning for day 2 of SD-WAN’s new operational model requires preparing for ongoing optimization, policy tuning, software updates, security changes, and continuous monitoring as applications and traffic patterns evolve—and they will evolve. When you define ownership, process, and tools for long-term operations early, you can position your SD-WAN environment as a platform for continuous improvement.
Lesson #18: You don’t have to go it alone.
Migrating from MPLS to SD-WAN, and then managing the SD-WAN environment on an ongoing basis, is complex and requires extensive IT, cloud, and security expertise, not to mention extensive resources, to handle the design, deployment, management, and ongoing maintenance of the infrastructure. The good news is that you don’t have to have a massive technical bench and deep pockets to successfully migrate to and operate an SD-WAN environment. Pure IP provides Managed SD-WAN, with network design and deployment for a smooth migration, centralized control and optimization, and continuous monitoring and support. Partnering with a trusted expert ensures you follow best practices, accelerates adoption, and provides your internal teams confidence that the SD-WAN network will meet business goals from day one.
Why Partner with Pure IP for your MPLS to SD-WAN migration?
- Vendor-agnostic SD-WAN solutions that are tailored to your business goals
- A long history of proven MPLS to SD-WAN migrations across a wide range of industries
- Ongoing managed services, including monitoring, optimization, and security
- Standardized deployment model that makes scaling fast and predictable
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Yes; SD-WAN can replace MPLS entirely, though some businesses maintain a hybrid approach, either temporarily during the transition or permanently for mission-critical applications.
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Yes; SD-WAN can optimize secure connectivity for remote or branch users to improve application access and experience over multiple network links.
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Mistakes that can create problems during migration, as well as ongoing management of the SD-WAN environment, include insufficient business-driven planning, neglecting security redesign, underestimating the operational changes needed, and skipping pilot testing.
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Most organizations migrate gradually, using pilots and phased rollouts to reduce risk and validate performance before full-scale adoption.
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Yes; to operate SD-WAN effectively, teams to be trained on policy management, application-aware routing, monitoring, and automation tools to operate SD-WAN effectively.
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While not required, working with an experienced partner, like Pure IP, can accelerate deployment, ensure best practices, and reduce operational risk, especially for complex or multi-cloud networks.
