The modern professional runs on the internet, and the reality is that traditional network delivery can no longer support her needs — or that of your business. As the era of knowledge workers unfolds around us, and cloud-based applications become standard, you can’t afford to have your connection become a bottleneck. It’ll diminish your resources, reduce your productivity and cut into your bottom line.
But there’s no need to panic! You can achieve a more perfect network — with SD-WAN. This comprehensive solution provides a fully scalable network by combining multiple connections into a single source. With SD-WAN, you can expect better bandwidth utilization, greater reliability and improved quality.
The Business Benefits of SD-WAN
Bandwidth Aggregation
SD-WAN consolidates all of your internet connections into a single source. You can bring together any connection type from any provider: DSL, Coax cable, fiber, 4G, LTE, T1 and whatever else you may have. This aggregation gives you more bandwidth, thereby increasing network speeds, so you have enough to power all your cloud-based, business-critical applications.
This is becoming especially important since much of the workforce is currently remote and digital methods of meeting have become the norm. However, it’s worth noting that you can keep your internet connections separate if that’s your preference. Some organizations do prefer to keep their VoIP and data traffic separate.
Failover
If an internet connection goes down during business hours, you’ll experience dropped VoIP calls, canceled transitions and widespread inconvenience for employees and customers alike. Obviously, this is something you want to avoid at all costs. You need a network that can quickly and seamlessly adjust to an internet issue so you don’t have to worry about downtime.
Because SD-WAN combines multiple internet connections, you get reliable internet connectivity. Here’s how it works: if one of your connections becomes degraded or goes offline, data transmission will continue uninterrupted, because the traffic will automatically be redirected to your other healthy links. And when the problem connection is fixed, the system will automatically add it back to its pipeline. No special configurations or specialists are required. You don’t have to deal with round-robin delays. It really is that simple.
With a failover solution, you get network redundancy, business continuity and the confidence that business will go on as usual in the event of an issue.
Quality of Service
When organizations mix their voice packets with data traffic in a network that was built to handle only data, you end up with voice quality issues. But with QoS, you can prioritize your most important applications over less sensitive traffic. Just assign priority layers within your SD-WAN network to ensure consistent data delivery and eliminate latency, jitter and packet-loss problems. Everything is prioritized by class and other customizable criteria based on your business’ needs.
The system is also dynamic enough to adapt to your network usage. QoS anticipates factors like application load requirements and fluctuations in network load to smooth out any disturbances. No doubt your business is more dependent on video applications than ever before. With QoS, you get a crisp video and clear call, every time.
Security
It would be reckless not to put safeguards in place to protect your digital information. The pace of data creation and dissemination increases every year and your organization’s data zaps around the world in milliseconds. Can you say that the transmission is safe with 100 percent certainty? Encryption is the most important privacy protection technology available. It protects your data whether it’s sitting on your computer or being delivered around the internet.
In addition to standard encryption, SD-WAN also breaks up sessions into their smallest possible components and spreads traffic across multiple internet connections to add an extra layer of security. So even if an attacker manages to capture one of your individual internet connections, he’ll only see a small fragment of your entire traffic.
Scalability
It has become increasingly difficult to plan for bandwidth needs in today’s market. What you need today could easily be too little tomorrow. But with SD-WAN, you can adaptively increase network bandwidth by layering on additional lines. Combine any connection to create a single line that delivers faster download and upload speeds.
There are so many variables that can affect your bandwidth needs. Get a network solution that scales to meet them when necessary, at a price you can afford.
Monitoring and Management
SD-WAN often comes with a secure portal for viewing and managing your entire network. Get proactive reporting of real-time network issues like jitter, latency, packet-loss, bandwidth fluctuations and usage so you’re alerted to issues before they become a problem.
You need visibility into what really matters to your network experience. And whether you need assistance troubleshooting, strategizing or resolving an issue, your SD-WAN provider should always be available to help. Make sure they can expertly pinpoint issues in real-time so that you’re able to focus on what matters most to your business.
Is SD-WAN Right for You?
You have insurance to protect yourself from potential disasters, right? Think of SD-WAN as insurance for your network. If something goes wrong (because it inevitably will), SD-WAN will be there to keep things running smoothly.
We’re living and working in a digital world where the security, scalability and reliability of your network is key to success. SD-WAN was designed to deliver the kind of advanced features and functionality that will improve your connectivity across the board. Maybe you can afford to risk an unreliable network. But if you can’t, it’s time to look into protecting your most important business asset.
