Ask Away Blog: Awesome Perks of Implementing SD-WAN in Businesses

An advanced SD-WAN can provide your team's agility to keep up with business change. This networking solution prioritizes traffic for critical applications and eliminates backhauling to reduce costs. It also provides the visibility IT teams need to monitor performance and security.

Improved Network Performance

Technology can be a tremendous equalizer for small businesses looking to streamline operations, increase productivity, and enhance customer satisfaction. That is why many businesses are trying to learn about SD-WAN and its integration into their businesses. The software automatically channels information through the fastest and most reliable connections when using SD-WAN, significantly improving performance. It prioritizes real-time data services such as voice-over IP (VoIP) and critical cloud-based applications. This reduces latency and jitter, leading to better employee productivity. SD-WAN allows you to utilize inexpensive internet broadband connectivity for low-priority traffic instead of expensive private multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) circuits. This increases bandwidth capacity and lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO). The network can also monitor the quality of underlay transport services and react to performance degradation by redirecting traffic. It also makes merging networks easier and simplifies IT operations with centralized management. To identify issues, you can view WAN and application performance statistics with a single dashboard. In addition, you can quickly and easily set up new branches and remote locations without requiring on-site IT specialists at each location. It's a great choice for growing businesses looking to maximize network performance.

Improved Security

One of the key perks that come with SD-WAN is improved network security. It uses a policy-based framework to prioritize business-critical traffic and applications over other data types. This helps reduce downtime, which can lead to frustration and lost productivity for employees. Additionally, it can be used to secure Internet connectivity so that data is channelized through an encrypted tunnel and is protected from cybercriminals. This is important because hackers increasingly target businesses that rely on cloud applications to store and process sensitive information.

This is because SD-WAN can use artificial intelligence to route traffic to the best-performing available link, eliminating bottlenecks and improving user experience. It also makes it easier to monitor the performance of cloud-based applications. Finally, SD-WAN can help to cut costs by leveraging low-cost links like broadband or 4G cellular instead of more expensive MPLS connections. This can result in savings of up to 40%. The best part is that these savings can be realized without sacrificing network performance. SD-WAN delivers the performance and reliability companies need to grow and compete in today's marketplace.

Scalability

SD-WAN solutions can handle a wide range of business applications with ease. A centralized controller and automated monitoring help improve network traffic management. In addition, an organization can easily optimize bandwidth usage through intelligent routing and path selection capabilities. It can also increase or decrease bandwidth on demand depending on the current needs of a business.

As a result, SD-WAN significantly reduces the time and money spent on IT infrastructure. It helps to eliminate expensive MPLS connections and allows for better application performance by leveraging direct-to-Internet connectivity. This means a new branch can be online in a fraction of the time it would take to deploy and configure a traditional router with similar capabilities.

Furthermore, the simplicity of deploying an SD-WAN solution enables IT teams to work more efficiently. Changes to security policies can be pushed out to 10s, 100s, or even 1000s of branches with minimal effort and error. This allows businesses to minimize IT workloads, freeing resources for more strategic projects.

Cost-Effectiveness

With the rise of digital transformation and cloud usage, moving data across the WAN is becoming more complex. A centralized and simplified network architecture with SD-WAN can reduce costs, improve performance and productivity, and streamline operations. The technology is designed to optimize bandwidth use by leveraging low-cost, high-performance Internet connections such as LTE, xDSL, or broadband Internet for most traffic and saving expensive MPLS circuits for critical applications. This helps to eliminate the trombone effect and improve last-mile performance, enabling enterprises to save on backhaul costs.

It can also centrally manage all WAN connectivity with intelligent policies aligning with business intent. This allows for automated path selection to avoid network bottlenecks and ensures consistent application performance. It can even remediate performance degradation by redirecting to a better-performing link.

An advanced SD-WAN solution can automate many manual tasks using machine learning forms, reducing human error and speeding up the system. This also helps to reduce operational costs by minimizing the need for IT staff to perform routine tasks and updates manually. A self-learning system can also make more accurate decisions based on instantaneous data to enable faster and simpler operations.

Flexibility

Unlike traditional networks that are a jumble of single-function proprietary hardware appliances, SD-WAN uses centralized management and cloud principles to simplify the network and security architecture. This helps IT teams prioritize resources, improve performance and scalability, reduce cost, and increase visibility and control. In addition, SD-WANs can offer flexibility in bandwidth and WAN connectivity. This is especially beneficial for small businesses that need to connect their employees to cloud applications. This will allow them to access and use these applications in the office, at home, or on the go.

Moreover, SD-WANs can also help reduce costs by enabling enterprises to connect remote offices to cloud-based applications without backhauling data to a central network. This can help companies to save money on leased lines and data transmission fees.