Businesses of all sizes are deploying SD-WAN to keep up with the changing needs of their organizations. It offers a more flexible and cost-effective networking technology that can be deployed at any location quickly and efficiently.
Real estate companies also benefit from SD-WAN by integrating multiple connections previously handled separately into a single network. It enables them to utilize the latest cloud tools crucial to business success.
1. Improved Performance
A company’s network connectivity should be a key focus for its management to ensure a smooth and productive work experience. A timely response time, even a tiny one, can lead to lost business opportunities.
In this regard, SD-WANs have become popular among enterprises due to their many benefits. The most significant are improved performance, security, and cost savings.
With SD-WAN, a company can easily manage multiple connections across its network for better application and end-user experiences. It is essential as organizations are increasingly deploying latency-sensitive applications to the Cloud.
Moreover, businesses can also take advantage of the flexibility of their SD-WAN by adapting to changing operational needs. It is possible since SD-WAN relies on an overlay network rather than a physical underlay, which allows for rapid deployment and adjustment to customers’ network requirements.
This flexibility has resulted in the emergence of new service providers offering SD-WAN services. It includes both managed and unmanaged offerings.
SD-WANs can also address security challenges that often overtax IT, teams. For instance, it can enable them to partition traffic and assets based on the security requirements of specific applications or business units. It can help prevent data loss and security attacks while meeting compliance requirements.
2. Enhanced Security
As more and more employees connect from remote locations to access business applications, it’s increasingly important to ensure the security of data transfers. For this reason, many organizations are turning to SD-WANs to enhance the safety of their networks.
An SD-WAN provides a local internet breakout for remote users, allowing them to use their preferred applications without having to backhaul the traffic from their branch offices to the headquarters data center. It reduces latency, improves performance and enables users to get the most out of their SaaS applications.
One of the basics of sd-wan is centralized policy management. It allows businesses to apply network policies that define unified standards for quality of service and security across the entire WAN surface area.
A network administrator can create and manage policies for all applications or select specific applications that make the most sense for a given business unit. It can help network administrators selectively apply advanced UTM processing to the traffic that warrants it and even allow them to test out cloud-based firewall services for some of their traffic.
Another way that SD-WAN solutions can help businesses achieve enhanced security is by improving the visibility of their network. It allows IT teams to identify and flag potential threats before they become a severe problems. It helps businesses reduce their overall risk profile, making them more secure and reliable.
3. Reduced Costs
SD-WANs can reduce costs across multiple areas, including licensing, network connectivity, security, WAN optimization and managed services. Cost savings also occur due to the increased management efficiency achieved through policy-based routing practices and zero-touch provisioning of WAN routers.
Businesses typically choose to deploy an SD-WAN because they want to improve the performance of their WANs, increase security and enhance their ability to scale their network capacity in line with business growth. These benefits are unavailable with legacy WANs, which rely on multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) to deliver bandwidth and reliability.
SD-WAN can save companies a lot of money on their internet connections. It helps them get their money back more manageably. Many people use it instead of MPLS because it is one of the main reasons. Eliminating all MPLS WAN connections for an all-Internet SD-WAN can reduce a company’s annual total cost of ownership by 62 percent.
Another key cost-saving benefit of SD-WAN is the maintenance and support costs reduction. It is because fewer resources are required to maintain a business’s IT infrastructure, and more can be dedicated to more strategic projects.
As a result, businesses can save money on their network costs and improve employee satisfaction. It can help them stay competitive and grow their revenue. Moreover, technology can empower employees to use data and digital tools, increasing productivity.
4. Increased Flexibility
Business agility is critical to your organization’s success in today’s business world. It allows you to respond quickly to new demands and opportunities. It also means your employees are less likely to become disgruntled with their work because the system works correctly and enables them to perform their tasks efficiently.
Another critical aspect of SD-WAN benefits is scaling up or down network capacity as your business needs change. It is beneficial if you have several locations and employees working remotely.
With traditional WAN designs, such as Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), branch traffic is backhauled to the company’s headquarters data center.
It can result in lower application performance and a poor user experience. Fortunately, SD-WAN can automatically prioritize mission-critical traffic and real-time data services.
The most critical business applications, like videoconferencing or cloud-based software, are routed across the strongest and highest-performing connections. The resulting quality of service is a huge boon to businesses and their customers.
It improves customer experiences and boosts employee productivity, increasing overall profits. In addition, SD-WAN can easily merge multiple networks into a single unified WAN.
It can benefit industries where mergers and acquisitions are common, such as pharmaceuticals. It can also simplify the onboarding process for companies that need to add and remove sites.
