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A business-driven SD-WAN optimizes IT resources with centralized control and visibility. It steers traffic securely and intelligently across the WAN and directly to cloud services, ensuring a quality experience for employees in branch offices and accelerating digital transformation initiatives.
An SD-WAN also eliminates the need for IT to travel to remote sites to perform tasks like upgrading hardware, software, and firmware, deploying new branches, and flexing bandwidth. This greatly reduces operational costs and increases IT productivity.
Streamlined Deployment
Traditionally, enterprises purchase hardware elements from multiple vendors and stitch them with in-house expertise or contractors. With SD-WAN, a single software interface allows configuration to be updated and deployed across locations automatically, reducing complexity and resources for network administrators.
Centralized orchestration means application policies that align with business intent can be easily implemented. This can eliminate the need for manual processes and improve visibility across the entire network, making it easier to detect and fix performance issues as they occur.
For example, when a site’s WAN connection goes down, keeping critical applications running can often be difficult. SD-WAN can help by dynamically steering data packets to other WAN links performing well, avoiding the loss of business services.
By implementing packet duplication, SD-WAN can also eliminate packet loss due to reordering. This is a common cause of outages across WAN links and can be extremely disruptive to employees.
Another advantage of SD-WAN systems provided by companies like Versa Networks is the flexibility to switch between MPLS and public Internet or mobile connections. Tunneling technology neutralizes the underlying connection type to accomplish this flexibility. This makes it possible to connect WAN lines using both MPLS and the Internet. Whenever possible, data packets can be transmitted along the fastest route, lowering latency and enhancing performance.
Better Visibility
As more business applications move to the cloud, the nonnegotiable needs for efficient bandwidth usage and excellent quality of service at the branch level remain. SD-WAN for UCaaS provides a solution to meet these needs and improve business productivity by automating tasks, improving visibility, and enabling greater flexibility and security.
The WAN market is complex, with numerous vendors offering connectivity, orchestration, and management. Choosing the right one is key. A business-driven SD-WAN offers a platform approach with unified services, including connectivity, network security, and WAN optimization. It centralizes control in the cloud and combines functions at the edge to offer enterprises more flexibility, performance, and economics, all delivered as a fully or co-managed service.
A business-driven SD-WAN also uses a secure connectivity method that channels data through an encrypted tunnel, ensuring no one else can intercept your sensitive information. This is important for businesses of all sizes, especially when protecting data traveling between locations, across the Internet, or through a public Wi-Fi connection.
Finally, a business-driven SD-WAN offers a more resilient and reliable service that provides unstoppable uptime. It features multi-path and diverse access, so the service will automatically shift to another path even if a single route fails. This enables you to maintain high levels of network uptime and avoid costly outages that can significantly affect your bottom line.
Better Security
The security features of SD-WAN are much more advanced than the traditional networking approach. With traditional MPLS, security is handled by a network hardware device at each branch location, which requires additional investments to install and maintain this equipment. With SD-WAN, the unified control and management platform allows setting policies automatically propagated to each device. This helps provide better visibility of your network’s devices, users, and applications, which is a key aspect of ensuring adherence to business goals and objectives.
Additionally, by prioritizing mission-critical traffic, SD-WAN provides a better way to handle bandwidth-hungry apps and higher performance needs. This can help eliminate bottlenecks and lower latency so employees can work more effectively even when the internet connection isn’t optimal.
Finally, SD-WAN also offers cost savings by leveraging low-cost internet connections and providing direct access to cloud services at remote locations. This can significantly reduce the amount of network data that needs to be backhauled over a costly network link, lowering costs and increasing agility.
The streamlined deployment, visibility, and security features of SD-WAN can dramatically improve the uptime and performance of your business network. With these benefits, it’s clear why more and more businesses are adopting SD-WAN to drive digital transformation and boost productivity.
Better Flexibility
In addition to being cheaper and faster, SD-WAN provides much greater flexibility. For example, a company can easily deploy an SD-WAN at a new location in days instead of weeks. This allows a business to meet the changing connectivity needs of customers and employees easily.
This is particularly important as it relates to meeting the increasing demand for secure, anywhere, anytime experiences that today’s customers and employees demand. With legacy WAN infrastructure, it took a lot of work to prioritize and send data securely over different connections, such as MPLS, internet broadband, and mobile WAN (LTE, 5G). With an SD-WAN, this is much easier. The technology automatically identifies the best path for the data based on network conditions, ensuring that critical applications get priority over non-critical ones.
The technology also supports more flexible bandwidth options, allowing businesses to save on costs when it comes to backhauling. MPLS backhaul is often more expensive than internet broadband or wireless WAN, but SD-WAN can help companies turn up new links to their branch offices for less and manage them better.
In addition, security is built into the technology, protecting data when it travels over the WAN. This makes it significantly harder for hackers to intercept information in transit. This helps to protect sensitive data and ensure that only authorized employees can access it, which is especially important when considering how much a single hour of downtime could cost a business in terms of lost revenue and productivity.
