Posted on January 24, 2020
More and more businesses are catching on to the SD-WAN trend as they hear about the benefits of this technology.
Although SD-WAN has been around longer than people realize, it’s now becoming mainstream due to the increase in businesses utilizing cloud technologies and SaaS (Software as a Service).
The traditional WAN isn’t able to effectively handle today’s application-intense traffic.
These technologies require reliable access to mission-critical communications solutions, even during an outage.
That’s where SD-WAN comes in.
Below are 7 key things you might not know about SD-WAN and how it can help your business thrive!
What SD-WAN Stands For
SD-WAN stands for Software-Defined Wide Area Networking. This term refers to the ability to select applications that you want to prioritize on a software-controlled level.
Traditional WANs suffer from problems such as packet loss, congestion, and outages. The inconsistent performance of traditional WANs is frustrating for users, especially when using low-latency applications like VoIP calling, video streaming, and virtual applications and desktops.
The complexity of traditional WANs is also extremely difficult to manage and expensive to expand.
SD-WAN was developed to solve these problems. SD-WAN solutions have a successful track record of improving application performance, lowering WAN costs, and strengthening business continuity.
SD-WAN allows you to improve your network’s performance with Customized Network Traffic Shaping in real-time, providing visibility into your network, user-level controls, and uninterrupted Quality of Service, just to name a few software-level capabilities. It allows businesses to deliver reliability and efficiency that today’s businesses demand.
How it Optimizes
SD-WAN optimizes network resources with cloud, voice, and data-first traffic prioritization. This enhances your network speeds, ensures quality and reliability, and automatically adapts to the way you do business.
It’s Intelligent and Seamless
SD-WAN is a robust way to optimize data traveling through your network, allowing for custom configurations of network traffic through Intelligent Load Balancing.
This feature allows mission-critical communications to always travel the fastest and best path available, ensuring that the standard quality of service necessary to operate is achieved.
SD-WAN will seamlessly maintain application sessions even when physical network connections are experiencing outages, packet loss, jitter, and congestion.
SD-WAN is Cost-Effective
In a case study performed by Network World revealed that SD-WAN saved customers up to 40 percent.
Cost efficiency is one of the top reasons why SD-WAN is rising in popularity. All companies (at least ones that want to stay in business), look out for the most efficient ways to cut costs. There should be no difference when it comes to considering which network capabilities to integrate.
It’s The Best Support for SaaS Apps and Internet Use
Is your company utilizing the cloud?
If your company’s cloud strategy includes providing your employees access to the Internet and your company’s SaaS apps, SD-WAN is the best solution to help you maintain security while ensuring a high-quality experience.
Does your company utilize the cloud in your HQ and branch offices?
SD-WAN brings new flexibility and control to the modern enterprise network by letting you connect your branches directly. Instead of backhauling remote and branch-site traffic via the central data center, you can maintain cost-effective connections directly to the Internet and SaaS applications from every location in your organization.
SD-WAN automatically recognizes Internet sites and SaaS applications and lets you define policies for how individual applications or families of applications are handled. You can choose which application traffic should immediately exit the branch, which should be sent to the data center, which should be blocked, and which should be logged.
SD-WAN Improves Security
Hackers are everywhere today. The last thing a company needs is sensitive information to be exposed and jeopardized. Unlike modern network devices that require manual configuration using SSH, SD-WAN is capable of self-segmentation. SD-WAN simplifies network design by segmenting information and then relaying the information to all appropriate areas in the network without protocols or external mechanisms. With the ability to segment networks and isolate traffic, SD-WAN can ensure that sensitive data remains secure. This provides businesses with:
- Stronger network infrastructure
- Robust security
- Integrated routing
Additionally, with SD-WAN you can manage and oversee the entire WAN through a single interface, providing you with total control of networking needs for better security.
It’s Easy to Implement
SD-WAN is easy to implement. With the right provider, you can typically integrate SD-WAN in less than 5 minutes!
SD-WAN works with any internet connection, supports up to 4 ISP’s (Internet Service Providers), and is designed to be transparent to any firewall and cloud application so you can maintain your provider, security, and compliance.
