Five SD-WAN Rollout Mistakes, and Their Antidotes

Five repeated rollout wounds and the boring antidotes: ownership, path mapping, hostile testing, voice, and the after-cutover month.

The failure modes repeat across organizations. The antidotes are dull, which is why they need writing down.

One: nobody owns the edges

An owner per site for cutover night, with phone rights, or the pilot becomes a rumor. Name names before equipment ships.

Two: accidental hairpinning

Cloud traffic home via the data center looks organized on slides and costs seconds per flow. Map real paths, Loose the ones that don't need central inspection.

Three: happy-path testing

Blue screens under fiber-cut drills, with busy branches and live driving teams. Happy graphs in a quiet lab mean nothing; the Mike Test extends to the network: run-outage day, deliberately.

Four: forgetting telephony by assuming

Voice rides the fun paths first: failover behavior tested with a call live, not a sip pinger from the documentation.

Five: the finish line at cutover

Post-cutover month: weekly drift review, helpdesk queries mined for patterns, QoS tuned us to the actual traffic, not the proposal's. The month AFTER cutover is the project.