SD-WAN enables businesses to replace MPLS with affordable last-mile Internet connections. This can result in both short-term savings and accrued long-term CAPEX savings.
Reliability
A reliable network is essential to a business’s success. Unreliable connectivity can lead to lost revenue and customer dissatisfaction, but a quality SD-WAN solution delivers many benefits that reduce the risk of downtime and improve productivity and security.
For example, if an organization’s WAN connections go down due to internet impairment, the network will automatically switch to a backup connection. This ensures mission-critical applications and traffic will always be up and running. Unlike MPLS, SD-WAN offers multiple ways to improve last-mile bandwidth, including link aggregation and path selection. Additionally, most SD-WAN solutions offer carriage diversity, which means data travels over multiple internet connections to avoid a single point of failure.
To help your customers understand the benefits of SD-WAN, talk to a high-value provider that can support a full range of deployment options. Discuss how an SD-WAN solution can help their company save money on leased lines, especially for remote locations that require secure and reliable connections. If your customers have plans to expand into new regions, they’ll need an SD-WAN solution that provides service consistency across strategic growth areas.
Scalability
Regarding business applications, few things are more frustrating for staff and customers than when the system crashes. With this in mind, businesses must ensure that their IT systems are reliable and secure.
With SD-WAN, organizations can improve reliability and resiliency with carriage diversity and multi-link balancing. This means that WAN traffic can be routed over different internet connections and prioritized based on real-time monitoring, which can reduce costly MPLS circuits or boost the capacity of less expensive data services.
SD-WAN also simplifies operations through centralized management functions such as workflow-based tools, zero-touch provisioning, and business-aligned policies. This reduces network engineers' time identifying and resolving problems, freeing them up to focus on other strategic projects.
There are many reasons why implementing SD-WAN into your business is worth the investment. If you are still determining whether or not it is right for you, why not book a demo with our team to see how we can help you achieve more from your network?
Flexibility
As with any major business investment, investing in SD-WAN should be weighed carefully. There are hard costs associated with deploying the technology, but there are also cost savings to be made in operational expenses and staffing.
Many organizations have to backhaul traffic from remote offices to data centers, which could be more efficient and affordable. With SD-WAN, companies can reduce their reliance on MPLS lines, saving bandwidth costs.
Another hard saving is reducing circuit over-provisioning. Using WAN optimization capabilities, it is possible to right-size circuits to meet the application’s bandwidth requirements. This can save up to $1000 per site every year.
A final area of cost reduction is improved network management efficiency. Manual configuration changes and on-site IT visits can take significant time and resources, which are better redirected toward strategic projects. With SD-WAN, centralized orchestration and zero-touch provisioning of routers from a single set of tools make it easier to manage the network, saving on both deployment and operational costs. This can recoup the initial investment within a short period.
Security
SD-WAN allows you to prioritize data in real-time. It evaluates multiple Internet connections and routes data through the one that exhibits the lowest latency and packet loss. If the primary circuit fails, it can also reroute traffic to an alternate Internet circuit. This ensures business continuity and protects your critical applications from the risk of outages.
Nothing frustrates employees or customers more than a network outage. Investing in an SD-WAN solution will improve application performance, which leads to higher productivity and customer satisfaction. SD-WAN can also help you rethink your cloud strategy to save bandwidth costs.
SD-WAN works by changing your WAN connections from private MPLS links to broadband Internet links. These secure connections are often 95-to-99 percent less expensive per megabit-per-second than private MPLS links. Depending on your current network architecture, you may be paying for a lot of bandwidth that has yet to be used. An infrastructure audit conducted by a TEM provider can identify and disconnect these underused connections to maximize cost savings. This will help you to reduce your overall networking costs and boost your ROI.
Management
Today’s digital enterprises rely on a hybrid combination of applications hosted in the cloud and in the enterprise data center. This multi-cloud environment means that WAN links are clogged with Internet-destined traffic, which reduces application performance and increases transport costs. SD-WAN’s policy management capabilities enable traffic to be intelligently routed across any available connection, whether that is MPLS, broadband or cellular connectivity, which saves bandwidth and improves performance.
By reducing the need to backhaul data to the corporate network and then reroute it, SD-WAN provides significant cost savings for organizations. Combined with a policy-driven approach to application performance, the resulting end-user experience delivers increased productivity and efficiency.
The ability to centrally manage and deploy network policies on customer premises equipment (CPE) deployed at branch sites enables IT teams to spend less time identifying and resolving problems and more time on strategic initiatives. EMA research found that smaller organizations with a handful of branches deploying SD-WAN could realize productivity gains of 3x or more. Adding business connectivity to the mix would drive these improvements even further.
