One of the reasons SD-WAN is gaining so much traction is that it can save businesses money. The costs associated with a network can often be very high, so anything that can reduce them is a good thing.
For example, many vendors are marketing the ability to use internet connections as vastly reducing MPLS costs. However, this is only sometimes true in all cases and needs to be evaluated thoroughly before making any decision.
Better Performance
A key benefit of SD-WAN is the ability to prioritize business-critical traffic and ensure it goes to the right place at the right time. This can reduce latency and packet loss, improving user experience while reducing business costs.
Additionally, enabling remote access to cloud applications has led to increased adoption of SD-WAN solutions. This eliminates the need to backhaul cloud traffic from branch offices to the data center, which introduces latency and impairs application performance.
One of the many benefits of SD-WAN is it optimizes traffic between headquarters and branches using dynamic tools like data compression, deduplication, and application acceleration. It can also use artificial intelligence to control traffic flow and re-route it to the highest-performing available link, maximizing bandwidth while improving overall network performance.
Reduced Downtime
Whether you are a small company with only one office or a large enterprise that has multiple locations, SD-WAN can save you money. This is because it can replace MPLS circuits with broadband Internet connections. This reduces the cost of your network and allows you to expand or downsize your network as your business grows.
SD-WAN also helps businesses improve last-mile reliability and redundancy. According to a recent Uptime Institute report, network failures trail only power outages as the leading cause of downtime.
The key is leveraging various transport methods, including xDSL, cable, and 5G, to link users to their applications. This eliminates the “trombone routing” problem common in legacy networking technologies.
The result is better last-mile performance and resilience, allowing your organization to leverage the cloud without compromising application performance. It also enables proactive failover, automatically failing over to more reliable and high-performance connections as necessary.
Increased Security
Security is one of the biggest concerns for many businesses today. Digital transformation is a powerful tool for achieving growth and market reach but can expose enterprises to security vulnerabilities.
SD-WAN is a secure networking technology that offers multiple security functions at the network level, including firewall, VPN access, and application layer firewalls. This ensures that your company’s data is protected from malicious attacks and unauthorized access by third parties.
It also allows for filtering web content and preventing malware from entering your network. This makes it an excellent choice for enterprises looking to protect their sensitive information from potential threats.
Another essential benefit of SD-WAN is that it allows you to use various network connections to connect your offices and branch locations. This includes private circuits, mobile networks, and any internet connection you choose.
In addition, SD-WAN lets you prioritize the traffic created at your remote offices and branches by moving more time-sensitive and high-bandwidth traffic over MPLS circuits and using cheaper local internet for less critical traffic. This helps reduce operational costs and increase efficiency.
Greater Flexibility
The Cost Savings of SD-WAN: Why It’s a Smart Investment for Your Business
One of the main benefits that evangelists of SD-WAN tout are the ability to save a significant amount of money. Often, this is because SD-WAN allows organizations to leverage readily available and low-cost broadband Internet connections in place of expensive MPLS circuits.
This can lead to a total reduction in WAN costs. In fact, according to TeleGeography research, a company can save up to 62 percent of its annual WAN costs by switching from MPLS networks to an all-Internet SD-WAN solution.
Moreover, with the flexibility associated with SD-WAN, companies can quickly scale their network infrastructure as their business expands and contracts. This is particularly important for companies that operate in multiple locations across the globe.
In addition, SD-WAN provides greater flexibility for branch offices as they can directly access cloud services and applications without having to backhaul them to a data center. This enables workers to work more efficiently and effectively. Ultimately, this can lead to higher productivity and profitability.
Better Visibility
For a business, better visibility is a crucial consideration. The ability to track and monitor network traffic across multiple WAN connections is vital to ensuring network performance is at its best and that all critical systems are up and running at all times.
SD-WAN provides this visibility by enabling a single, secure, automated WAN connection to connect remote offices, minimizing the need for manual configurations or on-site technicians. This ensures that network traffic is optimized for the applications being used, reducing the likelihood of downtime.
As more businesses embrace the cloud, it’s essential to ensure they access cloud-based applications as efficiently and securely as possible. Traditional networking approaches such as MPLS route all branch office traffic through the data center, lowering application performance and impacting productivity and user experience.
Using an SD-WAN solution, traffic is automatically and intelligently steered to the most reliable high-performance network connections supporting critical cloud-based and SaaS applications. This reduces downtime and latency, improving customer satisfaction and increasing employee productivity.
