With digital transformation driving many business priorities and expectations for network connectivity, businesses are looking to SD-WAN as a service. SD-WAN has an entire network security stack, a global private backbone, and seamless support for cloud and mobile.
This allows companies to connect their remote offices to a single internet connection. It also helps employees access data from any location or device with an internet connection.
Scalability
SD-WAN as a service has revolutionized the way companies can turn up new links to branch offices. It allows WAN interconnect services to be easily deployed without needing IT, network, or software changes.
With SD-WAN, businesses can intelligently route voice, video, or other sensitive traffic over expensive dedicated circuits while using less expensive internet broadband or wireless WAN (4G, 5G) connections for non-critical data traffic.
This way of dealing with WAN enhancement makes it simple for organizations to distribute data transfer capacity assets to a large number of utilizations while guaranteeing that they are sensible. This sets aside cash, increments data transmission productivity, and guarantees that all clients are associated with the most ideal association for their gadgets.
Convenience
SD-WAN enables businesses to connect their remote branch offices, cloud servers, and public clouds automatically. This eliminates manual configuration and deployment of network hardware in each location, resulting in reduced downtime and fewer network problems.
What is SD-WAN as a service to companies that manage their internet traffic more efficiently? An SD-WAN solution can reduce latency, improve customer experience, and increase productivity by enabling intelligent traffic routing and prioritizing mission-critical business traffic.
The software-based nature of SD-WAN allows it to determine the best path for each packet dynamically. This can dramatically improve the quality of circuits that would otherwise be considered commodity WAN links by reducing latency, jitter, and packet loss. This saves valuable resources that would be wasted sending data through poor connections.
Flexibility
SD-WAN as a service is an excellent way for businesses to stay ahead of the curve regarding IT developments. It helps enterprises quickly scale, connect to clouds, improve local office cloud access and employ security rapidly while automatically optimizing networks and traffic routing.
For example, an insurance company may need to ensure a new remote workforce has a reliable, high-quality network connection. An SD-WAN solution can automatically prioritize and route applications based on business intent, so work-from-home employees can keep up with their work responsibilities and have a positive user experience.
Additionally, an SD-WAN solution can help enterprises save on bandwidth by squeezing more performance from the internet and using multiple means of transport for connectivity. For instance, businesses can route all priority application traffic for a higher-quality connection – and all lower-priority web traffic over broadband internet.
This flexibility helps organizations meet changing needs, ensuring the proper network infrastructure is available to support the best applications and services at the right time. It also helps businesses make informed decisions on how to invest in the future of networking.
Cost-Effectiveness
SD-WAN as a service offers cost savings and increased operational efficiency. It can also help to reduce staff costs by eliminating the need for network optimization devices.
In today’s digital world, enterprises need to be able to connect to different locations securely. This means deploying and managing an adequate WAN infrastructure that can deliver quality traffic to every location and keep up with the demands of modern businesses.
However, traditional WAN architectures aren’t built to handle these challenges. When users access cloud applications, they often require backhauling data from branch offices to headquarters, which introduces latency and reduces application performance.
Fortunately, many advanced SD-WAN solutions offer the ability to use multiple forms of transport simultaneously. This helps to ensure consistent QoEx, even when WAN transport services are impaired by packet loss, jitter, and latency.
This is because a business-driven SD-WAN intelligently monitors and manages all underlay transport services to deliver high application performance and QoEx, irrespective of the underlying connectivity. It can also help to improve network resilience through proactive optimization and remediation of packet loss.
Security
A big part of the reason SD-WAN is the future of networking is that it can help improve network security. As cloud applications become increasingly commonplace, networks must ensure that users can access them securely, regardless of location or device.
Traditionally, networks have used packet-forwarding technologies to decide what route to take for data. These routes vary according to application traffic patterns and require low latency, high-quality paths for certain services such as VoIP or video conferencing.
But with a growing reliance on cloud applications, the need for a more intelligent routing approach has emerged. Ideally, the WAN should dynamically select the best route for each application and use all available transport methods to deliver traffic over the least expensive path.
A business-driven SD-WAN unifies routing, firewall, segmentation, visibility, and control functions into a single platform that can adapt to changes in traffic conditions. This provides a seamless operational flow for users, which increases productivity and reduces business risk.