Put WAN on Waivers, and Plug SD-WAN Into the Game
The benefits of a software-defined network are virtually endless.
There’s a saying in sports that a team is only as good as its weakest player, and the same can be said for businesses, especially when it comes to its IT infrastructure. A company can only be as agile as its least agile IT component. That would be the Wide Area Network (WAN).
Today, more and more companies are turning to cloud and software-designed solutions to experience greater efficiency, security and cost savings, and booting traditional WAN (the IT equivalent of the last kid picked in gym class) off the team.
SD-WAN is rooted in a software-defined network (SDN) which is made up of virtualized
components versus locally managed switches and routers in a standard network. The virtualization delivers greater efficiency and agility. SDN radically simplifies network provisioning, with predefined polices for balancing loads, responding to security threats, and segmenting access controls.
In addition to those advantages, there are several other benefits that SD-WAN can offer businesses, such as:
- Single connection for each location
- Secured connection to vital applications
- Lower overhead for WAN setup
- More flexible management and maintenance
- No expensive routers and firewalls
- Faster provisioning by easily adding, removing and upgrading Internet or cloud services
- Better bandwidth management
SD WAN can provide your business with more opportunities to meet growing workforce trends like virtual workers. The virtual office infrastructure is on the rise. According to the latest telecommuting statistics from Global Workplace Analytics, regular telecommuting grew 115 percent in the past decade, nearly 10 times faster than the rest of the workforce. For a business to support this flexible workplace option, you will need to integrate several components such as access devices, communications infrastructure, business applications, communication tools, and digital security. The addition of these components creates more complexity within an organization’s network and, by doing so, increases risk. SD-WAN makes it possible to manage several types of connections from MPLS to broadband to LTE. SD-WAN can provide the means to speed up applications through a direct link to the computing platform (like AWS) or WAN optimization techniques. With all the benefits that SD-WAN brings to a business, it is easy to overlook the underlying benefit—the cost savings.
Even though SDN and SD-WAN technologies have been available since 2015, CTOs and CIOs are now just starting to adopt the SDN infrastructure. While many IT departments are beginning to build the necessary skill set to deploy SD-WANs, they may not have the capability for a full-scale deployment.
An on-premise product won’t provide you the flexibility, choice, and scalability that SD-WAN can. Expanding your business network has never been easier or less expensive, so get your money’s worth by investing in a robust application that can evolve your business for years to come. To learn more about networking or other related information, give an Astound representative a call at 1-833-249-2786.
SD-WAN Whitepaper
So for enterprises with multiple distributed locations – whether regional, national or global – the question is not do we need SD-WAN, but rather, what is the best way to implement SD-WAN? If you would like to learn more about the advantages of SD-WAN, how to tell when you’re ready for it, and some tips for the best way to go about implementation, we invite you to download our white paper, The Software-Defined-WAN: A Technology Whose Time Has Come.
