Branch SD-WAN vs Traditional VPN: A Three-Dimensional Comparison of Cost, Performance, and Operations
May 18, 2026
The scenario: the real pressure of 5–10 branch offices. Last month a company in Miyun that rents out equipment came to me — they had just acquired two nearby sites, and their existing VPN suddenly became a bottleneck. The project manager sighed in frustration on the phone: “Pinging the ERP system from headquarters takes over 200 ms, and the warehouse side is even worse — sometimes sending a single quotation takes half a minute.” This is not an isolated case. When the number of branches…