Why Your Business Needs an SD-WAN Solution
The traditional WAN could be more suitable due to increased costs, degraded cloud performance, and limited agility.
Instead, SD-WAN delivers a secure and dynamic enterprise WAN infrastructure to meet the needs of your growing business.
It’s a software-defined solution that automates network traffic steering and management, increases application performance, improves security, and reduces bandwidth usage. It’s a proven solution that can transform your business and its technology ecosystem.
Improved Application Performance
An SD-WAN solution from the top managed sd-wan providers enables businesses to improve application performance by routing traffic over the best real-time path. This is especially important when cloud and SaaS applications are used.
Unlike VPNs, which send traffic over the public Internet, SD-WAN routes cloud and SaaS traffic directly to data centers or the public cloud with no backhauling, resulting in improved performance and efficiency.
This is particularly beneficial for organizations with remote workers who need to access cloud-based and SaaS applications. It also helps organizations manage security risks by ensuring that only the intended users can access networked devices and apps.
To achieve this, SD-WAN offers intelligent path control that steers traffic based on policy. This can be set at a centralized controller level and pushed to all SD-WAN devices.
Such a policy can be based on various parameters, such as IP addresses, application profiles, port numbers, or quality-of-service markings. This ensures that network performance is continually monitored and remedied when it begins to degrade. This prevents downtime and a negative impact on the user experience.
Improved Security
Suppose you send sensitive information such as credit card numbers or patient records online. In that case, an SD-WAN solution will encrypt the data and prevent anyone from snooping. This security feature is handy for sending data across public Wi-Fi networks where a hacker could intercept it.
SD-WANs also provide real-time monitoring of network and application performance. These alerts can help network administrators quickly identify any issues causing performance problems.
Another critical feature of SD-WAN is application optimization, which helps ensure that applications remain connected even when their bandwidth requirements exceed what the WAN can handle. This can be especially useful for businesses operating in areas with high packet loss and latency rates.
In addition to delivering security benefits, SD-WAN is a great way to increase visibility into network traffic, including IaaS and SaaS applications from Azure and Amazon Web Services. This visibility allows you to see if any problems can be fixed before they cause users to experience a poor user experience.
Increased Flexibility
One of the main benefits of an SD-WAN solution is increased flexibility. This lets you connect to remote locations easily and optimize your internal processes, significantly improving your application performance and staff productivity.
Another benefit of an SD-WAN solution is that it provides better application optimization than legacy WAN solutions, enabling users to enjoy seamless access to cloud-based and SaaS applications anywhere they are located worldwide. This allows employees to work from home or on business trips without suffering lag or dropouts in their internet connection.
SD-WAN also helps reduce costs by leveraging low-cost local Internet access and reducing the amount of data traveling over the WAN. This can be especially useful when employees send sensitive information over the public internet, such as credit card numbers or personal health records.
Lower Costs
SD-WAN provides the ability to move more data more efficiently, saving companies money. By routing network traffic to the most reliable connection at any given time, businesses can optimize bandwidth for mission-critical applications and services such as VoIP.
This reduces bandwidth costs and increases application performance while reducing network complexity. It also ensures a fast and seamless Internet connection, which helps businesses meet customer expectations for speed.
Another key benefit of an SD-WAN solution is that it offers a much easier way to manage your business’s network. With its centralized control, automated management functions, and easy-to-use dashboard, it is much less complicated for your team to make changes.
Additionally, your business can save on costs for network maintenance. You can cut costs by eliminating needing a third-party contractor to add connections or components to your IT network. This will help your company remain competitive and retain employees. It will also reduce time spent on IT-related projects and tasks.
Reduced Downtime
Reduced downtime is one of the most important benefits of an SD-WAN solution. It can improve network uptime and meet your business goals by ensuring you’re always connected.
When transmitted across a WAN, latency, and packet loss often affect applications like VoIP and web-based videoconferencing. This can affect the reliability of the call, which can cause delays in work output.
When this occurs, an SD-WAN solution can automatically optimize the application to ensure the underlying network connection is not impacting it. This can help users avoid lag and dropouts when working from home or on business trips.
In addition, SD-WAN also reduces downtime by dynamically routing traffic to a more stable Internet connection if a WAN path becomes unavailable. This is known as active-active failover, and it can prevent interruptions in business-critical applications.
