Many businesses rely on cloud applications to connect staff and customers. These applications need high-quality bandwidth and can be affected by various issues like latency and packet loss.
SD-WAN provides an automated policy-based framework that delivers the application performance and centralized management from one easy-to-use interface. It can also help businesses reduce costs by delivering traffic over the least expensive connection type.
Improved Network Performance
In today’s highly competitive and technology-driven business environment, the reliability of your network is vital to success. A single hour of downtime can cost your company thousands in revenue and lost productivity. With that said, deploying an SD-WAN solution can help you improve network performance to ensure employee and customer satisfaction.
With SD-WAN, you can combine multiple internet connections into a single pipe for reliable connectivity. It helps to minimize downtime as if one of the connections experiences issues, data will be rerouted to the other healthy connection without any delays. In addition, it can automatically add the downed link back into the pipeline once it’s fixed, providing a seamless failover experience that will not disrupt data transmission.
Next-gen SD-WAN solutions also feature dynamic routing with policy-based rules and real-time path monitoring. It enables you to eliminate the trombone effect by optimizing traffic over the best-performing paths, reducing latency, and improving overall application performance for mobile users and cloud services. It also reduces costs by utilizing broadband internet instead of costly MPLS circuits.
In addition, an SD-WAN system can seamlessly merge multiple networks into one, which is perfect for companies involved in frequent mergers and acquisitions. The ability to quickly set up and scale bandwidth at remote offices makes it easy to increase capacity as needed.
Reduced Downtime
If you own a business that relies on technology for internal communication between employees and branches, bandwidth is one of the most critical factors for performance. Modern SD-WAN systems allow you to combine multiple WAN connections into a single network for greater capacity and more stable performance.
Managing the WAN has traditionally been one of the most complex parts of running an enterprise network. SD-WAN streamlines the process by leveraging programmable network devices and dynamic best-path routing, which improve cost, agility, and performance. Centralized control and management are facilitated from a single-pane-of-glass interface, making it easier for IT to define and deploy policies that ensure compliance with business requirements.
As a result of these changes, IT can prioritize network traffic and reduce latency for critical applications. The ability to reroute traffic on demand also means that companies can add capacity in the locations where it’s needed most. This scalability also makes it possible to quickly set up new connections at remote sites, improving the speed and efficiency of opening new branches. Furthermore, SD-WAN simplifies redundancy and failover by allowing organizations to leverage low-cost public links like broadband Internet or 4G LTE, which are more affordable than MPLS on a dollar-per-bit basis. The technology is also self-healing, so an SD-WAN can automatically switch to another path for uninterrupted service in the event of a single point of failure.
Increased Security
An SD-WAN solution operates as a network overlay and can be configured to your organization’s specific operational requirements. It enables you to respond quickly to changing business needs and gives you complete visibility into your company’s internet performance across branches.
With traditional networking approaches like MPLS, traffic is backhauled to a centralized point (often a data center) for security reasons. It introduces latency and hinders application performance. SD-WAN eliminates this issue by routing traffic to the best available path based on application and bandwidth requirements and the network’s overall health.
The technology lets you connect multiple sites to a single cloud-managed fabric, simplifying management and increasing reliability and security. Depending on your SD-WAN solution, you may also benefit from lower costs and bandwidth efficiency, improved WAN agility, simplified onboarding, and seamless integration with your existing enterprise architecture.
The customer premises equipment (CPE) deployed at each remote site varies. Still, it is typically a hybrid of routers and WAN optimization devices with built-in VPN capability and some form of policy management. Some offer a range of additional functions, including cloud connection management, unified threat detection, and analytics. Ensure you select an SD-WAN vendor that offers comprehensive security options to protect your investment. It includes a thorough vulnerability scanning process, quality assurance, and regular patching.
Reduced Costs
Compared to traditional MPLS networks, SD-WAN solutions can reduce bandwidth costs by utilizing readily available and low-cost connectivity options such as broadband Internet and 4G mobile connections. It is done through dynamic traffic routing based on company-set policies. The system ensures better performance and eliminates packet loss by directing mission-critical and real-time applications to the most reliable routes. It ultimately leads to improved employee productivity, higher customer satisfaction, and fewer lost revenue opportunities.
Additionally, with centralized control and virtualized edges, SD-WAN limits hardware requirements and simplifies management, reducing infrastructure expenses. Lastly, SD-WAN is highly scalable when it comes to bandwidth. It allows companies to increase bandwidth across all locations if needed. Alternatively, decreasing bandwidth at remote sites is simple if they’re no longer required. This flexibility and scalability can help enterprises lower network costs by reducing the number of expensive leased lines that are no longer utilized.
With so many benefits, it’s no wonder many businesses are implementing an SD-WAN system. If your business is considering this solution, we suggest speaking with a TEM provider who can help you extract the maximum value and ROI from your deployment. They can provide you with fully transparent billing data and access to dispute channels to get the best rates and minimize your network expenditures.
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