When evaluating network technologies, executive leaders often rank 24/7 year-round resiliency, optimizing application performance, and centralizing management at the top of their list. SD-WAN delivers on these goals and more. Network teams also look to improve business performance by routing critical applications through reliable, high-performance connections that eliminate jitters and latency issues. This leads to exceptional performance that boosts employee productivity and morale.
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Visibility
SD-WANs are built with visibility, allowing organizations to track application performance and security from a single pane of glass. It can also monitor and alert if there is a change in traffic patterns, which can indicate malicious activity. Moreover, SD-WANs can use low-cost internet connections, such as broadband and cellular broadband, to route traffic for high-priority applications. This helps reduce network costs and improves WAN performance by saving expensive MPLS bandwidth for non-critical traffic. Additionally, SD-WANs can efficiently merge several networks into a unified one. This is useful for organizations undergoing mergers and acquisitions and needing to consolidate their IT infrastructure. To ensure the organization’s security, professionals at Versa Networks may suggest integrating SD-WAN with firewall protection that provides robust multi-factor authentication methods such as passwords and biometrics. This will help prevent unauthorized access to data and systems.
Furthermore, it should also include a VPN that can secure remote users’ connections to the company network. This is vital, especially since hacking attacks are becoming more common. This will minimize the effects of a breach and help the company recover quickly.
Cost-Effectiveness
The centralized control of SD-WAN enables business operations to be managed through cloud-based consoles. Manual configurations often necessary in traditional WAN environments can be eliminated, saving significant IT resources at each location. This translates into hard savings for businesses. In addition, the hardware requirements for SD-WAN are considerably lower than MPLS equipment. This lowers the cost of both initial hardware purchase and ongoing maintenance. Another benefit of SD-WAN is its dynamic path selection feature that automatically sends network traffic across the most efficient and reliable connections. This improves application performance and productivity.
Additionally, the technology can optimize applications sensitive to latency and packet loss. Moreover, remote employees can access the Internet regardless of their physical location. This helps increase productivity and eliminates the need to bring in additional IT personnel at each site. The result significantly reduces the typical 4 hours of organizational downtime experienced each year. This is good news for both the business and its customers. It also leads to lower WAN costs as bandwidth is well-spent on non-critical applications.
Scalability
Unlike legacy MPLS solutions, SD-WAN can utilize broadband Internet access at the edge to improve network performance and reduce costs. SD-WAN can also be easily scaled to add new locations quickly and securely. SD-WAN also offers more control at the application level than traditional solutions. This helps you prioritize critical applications and ensures that the most important data gets sent over the best link for optimal performance. It’s easy to eliminate problems like latency, jitter, and packet loss, as the solution monitors the quality of each connection and automatically routes traffic over a different path when necessary. A centralized management system makes it simple to manage multiple sites, home offices, and cloud environments from a single platform. This reduces the time IT teams spend on hardware maintenance, lowering OPEX. Plus, bringing new sites online with an SD-WAN solution takes minutes versus days, allowing you to get back to work faster.
Flexibility
Today’s organizations’ fluid hybrid work environment requires dynamic edge capabilities to support employees based in multiple locations. These workers use cloud-based applications and systems to perform their jobs, which can lead to security issues if not properly managed. This is why it’s essential to consider the functionality of an SD-WAN solution to ensure your organization has the right capabilities to protect the information and applications you depend on. One of the key benefits of an SD-WAN is that it provides flexibility and scalability. It can help businesses reduce costs by switching out expensive MPLS connections for VPNs or economic broadband services like Ethernet, Internet, and cellular broadband. It can also increase WAN performance by prioritizing data traffic over the best network connections to prevent latency, jitter, and packet loss. It can even reroute data around troubled network links to minimize downtime.
Additionally, an SD-WAN can provide centralized management with responsive performance reporting. This gives IT a bird’s eye view of network operations and allows them to make changes quickly. This helps to ensure employee and customer satisfaction, which can improve morale.
Security
SD-WAN has built-in security measures to help ensure your organization’s security. It does this by monitoring traffic to determine the best path for it. It also monitors latency, jitter, packet loss, and bandwidth utilization. Then it routes the data to the best link based on these criteria, which improves performance and eliminates problems. Another way that SD-WAN helps with security is through its agnostic approach to switching protocols. This means that it is not tied to a particular switch, which reduces the risk of single points of failure and provides redundancies. It also allows for the use of multiple transport methods to avoid overspending on expensive MPLS links. Finally, it is possible to configure security directly on the SD-WAN device, which helps to lower the operational overhead. This can be a huge benefit, especially for organizations needing more hardware or personnel resources at branches. As a result, managed SD-WAN can provide centralized control of the quality of service and security policy across the organization with a unified approach. This can reduce the operational workload for IT teams and make it easier to manage.