SD-WAN decouples networking hardware from the control mechanism to enable simpler management and configuration. Choosing the right solution with a managed service provider can ease network migration and help you keep up with technology trends and advancements.
Maintaining unstoppable uptime is critical to your business. Ensure your remote offices can access cloud applications and SaaS solutions without being routed through the data center using an SD-WAN.
Reduced Costs
Many IT teams seek ways to lower networking costs, improve branch office connectivity, and increase agility. The goal is to achieve all of this without sacrificing resiliency and performance. SD-WAN offers a way to deliver improved network performance through dynamic routing and offloading non-critical application traffic to low-cost Internet connections. But why is SD-WAN important? It reduces MPLS bandwidth consumption, lowering costs and improving WAN efficiency.
Additionally, centrally managed policy changes eliminate the need for specialized IT expertise on-premise at each branch. It frees up engineering time to focus on business-enriching projects and speeds up the roll-out of new policies.
Finally, a robust SD-WAN solution allows enterprises to avoid the security costs of legacy networks that require them to backhaul all branch Internet traffic to a central data center for inspection and policy enforcement. Instead, SD-WAN allows traffic to be routed over any Internet connection based on company policies while ensuring high quality of service and compliance. It significantly lowers IT security costs and improves WAN performance.
Improved Security
SD-WAN uses software to ensure that network applications operate smoothly and dependably. It improves WAN connection performance for latency-sensitive apps like audio and video. Additionally, it reduces networking costs by allowing organizations to use less expensive Internet connections for traffic that doesn’t require the highest quality. Centralized application performance and security policy management means consistency for the entire organization. It leads to easier troubleshooting and reduced time IT experts spend at each location on routine maintenance.
When choosing an SD-WAN vendor, look for one that offers APIs to help automate the deployment process. It allows you to monitor your WAN through a single management portal, where paths to applications can be assigned according to criticality, and users can flex their bandwidth on demand. This centralized monitoring also helps to reduce network complexity, making it easy to scale your SD-WAN as your business grows. It enables you to achieve the ROI on your investment more quickly.
Improved Application Performance
One of the key benefits of SD-WAN is improved application performance. IT teams can prioritize critical traffic and real-time services, ensuring that the most important data gets sent over the best network path, with the ability to detect and avoid packet loss and latency issues.
An SD-WAN can also help improve business agility with the ability to dynamically scale resources and connections on the fly, overcoming the limitations of traditional WAN architectures that depend on expensive MPLS links or backup internet connections for failover that are slow and have inconsistent connectivity. SD-WAN can also reduce the need to maintain specialized IT staff in remote offices by automating configuration changes and enabling zero-touch provisioning with pre-defined templates.
Lastly, SD-WAN can help with security and compliance by enhancing the visibility of applications, devices, users, and networking. It includes monitoring performance metrics from branch offices and cloud/SaaS, performing deep packet inspection and filtering, enabling VPN capabilities, encrypting and securing connections, and integrating with cloud-security functions. These features support the deployment of cloud and SaaS applications and improve adherence to corporate policies.
Increased Flexibility
SD-WAN makes adding new branches or offices to the network easy, as needed. This flexibility supports an organization’s growth and changing networking requirements.
The scalability and flexibility of SD-WAN also help reduce networking expenses. For example, organizations can use relatively inexpensive internet connections for data traffic while reserving more costly MPLS links for mission-critical applications. It facilitates a company’s networking expenditures while still providing a high level of performance.
Another benefit of SD-WAN is that it provides greater visibility into the network. It allows IT teams to identify and resolve problems quickly. The SD-WAN platform can track and monitor the quality of the WAN connection at all times and provide detailed real-time application and network performance information.
Investing in an SD-WAN solution is bright for companies of any size. It can improve productivity by reducing latency, boosting bandwidth, and increasing reliability and security. If you’re considering an SD-WAN solution, find a vendor with robust administration tools and centralized monitoring. Your network will function at its best and be more accessible to maintain with these features.
Reduced Downtime
SD-WAN aggregates multiple direct-to-internet (DIA) links for WAN connectivity, reducing telco costs using less network hardware. It also makes it easier and faster to get new branch offices online. Instead of relying on costly MPLS links between branch offices and headquarters, SD-WAN uses low-cost broadband Internet or wireless WAN (4G, 5G) links to carry data, voice, and video traffic over the WAN. It significantly reduces the data that must travel over a traditional backbone WAN. It improves performance by prioritizing critical applications, ensuring they are always sent over the best available path.
SD-WAN devices can automatically measure WAN connections’ latency, jitter, packet loss, and bandwidth utilization, then route traffic to the most reliable link. It helps organizations avoid downtime caused by a single point of failure and enables them to meet their SLAs for application performance. Centralized management is a crucial benefit of SD-WAN, as it provides a simplified way to manage firewalls and routers, software and firmware upgrades, centralized security policies, and flex bandwidth from one interface.
