As enterprises enter the era of digital transformation, SD-WAN has become a next-generation network solution.
In the past few years, the deployment of software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) has grown rapidly, and this is for good reason. Although it is still an emerging technology, companies quickly realized that it is a more effective and cost-effective way to enhance WAN performance to meet cloud infrastructure requirements.
The technology industry is constantly evolving. It used to be the newest and greatest, but soon fell behind.
SD-WAN is quickly becoming one of the latest innovations that can disrupt programs and help provide the benefits of the cloud. As enterprises become more aware of the advantages of SD-WAN, IDC predicts that by 2020 the value of the global SD-WAN market will reach $6 billion, and the adoption rate will increase rapidly.
As enterprises enter the era of digital transformation, SD-WAN has become a next-generation network solution. From application performance and agility, to network security and cost savings, organizations can benefit from SD-WAN and all its features.
So, why use SD-WAN?
Imagine your company has branches in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, two of which can be connected via a single Internet connection, while the third uses multiple Internet providers.
Given that using the Internet for critical business applications will bring security vulnerabilities and performance fluctuations, your company needs a more powerful network solution that could only be achieved by building a dedicated MPLS network to connect all its sites together.
Without a large internal IT department and a large budget for high-availability backup access, expansion will be time-consuming and expensive. Until the introduction of SD-WAN.
SD-WAN?
Network performance and agility are critical to the success of digital transformation programs and the effectiveness of the hybrid IT environment that supports them. As the amount of data grows and applications become more dispersed, network technology must be equally agile to keep up.
SD-WAN has now become a transformative connection technology that enables companies of all sizes with multiple branches or locations to create smarter enterprise wide area networks.
As companies use more and more cloud-based applications, traditional WAN networks can no longer maintain strong speeds and optimized connectivity. SD-WAN is the coverage map. It provides visibility and control of the underlying network so that users can control network settings and prioritize traffic. This means that IT teams can quickly and easily define rules to prioritize the most important network traffic (such as voice and critical applications). As long as there is an existing connection to the Internet or LTE (4G), it can also add new sites to the WAN very easily.
When implementing SD-WAN, it is important to ensure that current application performance and user experience are not affected. The organization’s IT team needs to ensure that they are proficient in the WAN management portal and can fine-tune the network configuration until the desired performance is achieved. This is different from traditional WAN solutions, which have harder coding and lower flexibility. This change in concept is an important factor in the successful deployment of SD-WAN.
Business Benefits of
SD-WAN SD-WAN provides numerous benefits for businesses of all sizes. SD-WAN is especially useful for any organization that has multiple locations and needs to provide secure, reliable, and manageable connections between locations ideal.
SD-WAN not only saves costs, it also provides a simple, secure, and agile enterprise-level WAN connection for companies that use cloud-based applications in distributed branch locations.
The overall advantage of SD-WAN is that it enables organizations to stay focused on IT business goals. By comparing with traditional WAN, it seamlessly connects remote branch locations to private networks in a simple, fast and more cost-effective way without any on-site IT support to achieve this.
The beauty of SD-WAN is that it can create a global network connection that is always secure and provides the security that businesses need within their existing Internet, so you can trust all the software as a service (SaaS) applications you use Today and tomorrow. Unlike traditional and MPLS solutions, SD-WAN as a standard provides end-to-end encryption of data in transit, thus making it inherently more secure.
How different departments can take advantage of SD-WAN
The adoption of SD-WAN has achieved significant growth in various industries and company sizes. Generally, the more an enterprise depends on IT applications that need to communicate with the company's distributed locations, individuals, and devices, the greater the potential benefits of SD-WAN deployment.
Retail
Organizations in retail spaces with a large number of remote or branch offices require a secure network to protect the transmission of credit card information captured during payment operations.
For retail organizations, it is also important to have an efficient network to support employees in time-sensitive tasks. SD-WAN technology can provide enterprises with the security needed to send and receive retail financial data and ensure that the network is always fast and efficient.
Financial Services The
financial industry is another industry that will benefit from the increased security, reliability and performance of SD-WAN. When providing services to customers, organizations such as banks need to quickly and reliably access their databases. Financial networks also increasingly need access to cloud services in order to function normally, which is not an option on private networks.
Education
Education is perhaps one of the industries that benefit most from digital transformation. Not long ago, schools only had ICTs directly related to the subject in their classrooms. Now, with the rise of personal devices, digital courses and online assessments, schools have an increasing demand for bandwidth management.
SD-WAN allows universities to prioritize academic traffic and applications based on the needs of the student population (streaming services such as Netflix). It can also subdivide student visits from teachers, administrators and guests to protect the privacy of students. For schools, universities and other public and private educational institutions, SD-WAN can provide a better learning experience at a lower cost and higher bandwidth.
The speed of technological progress means that companies must keep up with the pace of development, otherwise they risk becoming irrelevant. The same can be said in terms of connectivity. Business needs are growing rapidly, and there is a need for better, more cost-effective and more powerful solutions.
As more and more organizations reap the benefits of SD-WAN, we may begin to see changes in our view of the technologies that lay the foundation for business growth and success. The advent of SD-WAN now means that organizations can continue to focus on their IT business goals, while ensuring that connectivity is not a weak link in cloud adoption, but the foundation of digital success.
The above is an introduction to the impact of SD-WAN on enterprises.
VeCloud is a technological innovation enterprise that provides cloud exchange network services for enterprises as its core business. It has 30 data center nodes around the world, more than 200 POP nodes, and serves more than 300 major customers, involving finance, Internet, games, AI, Education, manufacturing, multinational companies and other industries. http://www.vecloud.com