Traditional WANs are expensive, inflexible, and difficult to manage. They require specialized skills for configuration, monitoring, troubleshooting, and more.
A flexible WAN can help businesses connect more remote sites and improve application performance and security. Moreover, it can reduce operational costs.
Improved Application Performance
Many applications — such as VoIP, video, and UC — rely on smooth WAN connectivity to deliver the best possible experience at branch offices and remote workers. Poor WAN performance can reduce employee productivity and lead to severe costs, including lost revenue.
Many businesses have turned to WAN optimization solutions when faced with these challenges. These solutions offer real-time bandwidth optimization to ensure that applications run smoothly, no matter where they are in the network.
The benefits of SD-WAN take this further with intelligent path control that steers traffic based on application type and performance needs. These policies are defined at the centralized controller level and pushed out to all SD-WAN devices.
This capability enables companies to prioritize mission-critical applications without prioritizing lesser-performing ones. This can help minimize bandwidth degradation caused by congestion, latency, and packet loss.
Another benefit of SD-WAN is that it provides greater visibility into end-to-end WAN performance across multiple connections. This gives IT and network teams the information they need to determine what routes will provide the most optimal performance for their business.
In addition, SD-WAN can also help organizations improve WAN bandwidth by optimizing how traffic is routed over their existing WAN transport. This can include data compression or deduplication and application acceleration if needed.
Better Security
With remote employees accessing applications and resources in the cloud, more than the traditional network perimeter is needed. IT must provide a secure, flexible solution to enable access from the cloud and beyond.
Using SD-WAN, IT staff can isolate and prioritize traffic by using micro-segmentation. This strategy helps keep malware and worms from spreading to other areas within the network. Additionally, IT can use network policies to ensure that high-priority traffic always travels on a particular link.
Another essential feature of SD-WAN security is application optimization. This function automatically prioritizes traffic for vital applications, ensuring they have the bandwidth they need without compromising service quality or slowing down less critical applications.
Combining various network connection types into an SD-WAN makes identifying and prioritizing traffic based on its importance, such as voice or video, easier. This can reduce costs and improve performance for users located at different locations.
In addition, if you plan to use your SD-WAN as a gateway, you can integrate with threat intelligence services to help you detect and remediate potential security breaches before they cause harm. This is particularly helpful if you have sensitive data in transit.
In addition to these advantages, SD-WAN offers several other benefits that make it the Future of Enterprise Networking. These include improved application performance, reduced costs, and better management.
Reduced Costs
IT infrastructure and staff are significant components of an enterprise’s total costs. However, many organizations need help tracking expenses and optimizing spending based on data.
Companies that deploy SD-WAN can save much money in the long run. The technology is a highly effective way to repurpose expensive private circuits and eliminate backup paths that aren’t being used.
According to experts, this can save bandwidth expenditure. Additionally, it can reduce the number of physical network devices that need to be maintained and ensure a single bill from one provider.
For example, retail stores use SD-WAN to connect their branches to the cloud, allowing them to capitalize on performance-sensitive applications like real-time communications. This eliminates the need for a costly backup circuit and provides branch workers with a reliable, secure connection.
Furthermore, businesses can easily migrate to direct cloud connections to lower the cost of connectivity and improve operational efficiency. In addition, SD-WAN can help avoid unnecessary backhauling of traffic, reducing application performance and negatively impacting user productivity.
Besides saving money, SD-WAN helps boost employee morale by delivering a superior user experience across the enterprise network. This is particularly important for remote and branch offices, where access to cloud applications can be difficult due to low internet coverage or a lack of broadband service.
Better Management
As the enterprise grows, multiple security and WAN optimization appliances can become a complex and time-consuming management burden. A centralized, cloud-based SD-WAN gives you a central view of your network and eliminates the need for multiple appliance deployments.
In addition, SD-WAN has a built-in quality-of-service feature that helps ensure that users are always getting the best network performance. This helps prevent data from being sent to the wrong locations, which can harm business operations and customer satisfaction.
Another essential feature of SD-WAN is the ability to reroute traffic automatically using artificial intelligence to optimize application performance. This means that applications get the bandwidth they need to run efficiently, even if requirements change.
For example, if video calls require more bandwidth than the chatter, the SD-WAN will steer traffic to a faster link and deliver a high-quality experience. This enables you to quickly scale up and down your network as business demands change.
In addition to the better management benefits of using SD-WAN, it enables organizations to deploy new sites much more quickly and easily. A zero-touch provisioning process allows new remote offices to be connected to your network and managed in hours or days.
