The increasing migration of business data to the cloud is causing significant changes in Internet traffic, driving businesses to look for new technologies that adapt to these disruptive changes. The emergence of SD-WAN network technology has integrated advanced features into WAN-type communications networks, thus responding to growing connectivity needs. Although there is much information on the deployment of this technology, other SD-WAN properties that can further enhance applications that utilize communications networks, specifically WANs, have not been sufficiently highlighted. Therefore, this research aims to compare a software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) scenario with a hub-and-spoke (hub/branch) topology incorporating the Direct Internet Access (DIA) feature, versus a traditional hub-and-spoke (hub/branch) network scenario with a centralized Internet. Both scenarios are addressed from the perspective of enterprise connectivity. To this end, both scenarios were implemented and, through quantitative experimentation, network metrics such as jitter, latency, route efficiency (network hops), and availability were analyzed. To establish end-to-end communication, an application on the AWS Cloud (EC2 service) was used as a reference. The results showed a 73.1% reduction in jitter, a 10.98% decrease in latency, and a 30% improvement in routing efficiency. Furthermore, a significant increase in network reliability was observed, reaching 99.98% availability, which translates to a downtime of just 0.14 h for the application hosted on the AWS Cloud.