How Can SD-WAN Solutions Providers Help Your Business?

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Reduced Costs

Usually, the best SD-WAN solutions providers offer their services on a subscription model. This can reduce your costs significantly by eliminating upfront hardware, connectivity, and professional services fees. This contrasts traditional MPLS networking, which typically requires an upfront investment and ongoing maintenance costs.

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Another benefit of SD-WAN is that it allows you to customize your network and control its policies based on your specific needs. This will enable you to prioritize applications and allocate bandwidth based on your business needs, which can be beneficial in ensuring that mission-critical processes are always prioritized over less critical applications.

SD-WAN also provides excellent resiliency and efficiency by routing data over the most vital available link. This helps you avoid costly downtime, which can be highly frustrating for your employees and customers. In fact, according to Avaya, 82% of organizations experience organizational downtime, which can be reduced by deploying an SD-WAN solution.

Furthermore, SD-WAN can provide scalability as your bandwidth needs change. You can add, reduce, or combine bandwidth without hiring a contractor. This will help you save money as well as time and effort. It will also improve employee and customer satisfaction. This is because employees can access the information they need more quickly, and customers won’t experience delays in purchasing.

Enhanced Security

Whether your business is expanding or has been around for decades, the right SD-WAN solution can protect sensitive data. Look for a provider that offers cloud security and unified threat management as part of the platform. These features can help your organization avoid costly cyberattacks. They can also ensure your network connections stay secure by directing traffic to the most suitable bandwidth option. This helps reduce costs by eliminating redundant infrastructure and enabling employees to work remotely.

A centralized, cloud-delivered dashboard can give you visibility and control your entire network. This reduces the IT effort and time required to manage your WAN and allows you to get more out of your existing investments in hardware. For example, you can avoid expensive MPLS links by letting your branch offices connect to the internet directly, which improves user experience and lowers costs.

SD-WAN solutions providers can also help increase your application performance. By directing your network traffic to the most suitable path, you can ensure that applications are not affected by latency or packet loss. This is crucial for ensuring business productivity and employee satisfaction. It also eliminates the need for backhauling cloud-bound traffic from branches to the enterprise data center, which can introduce costly delays and impair performance. The result is a seamless on-ramp to the cloud that delivers improved application performance and enhanced security for your critical applications.

Scalability

Prioritizing data through multiple WAN routes improves application performance, increases reliability, and reduces costs. It also eliminates the need for costly plain old telephone service (POTS) lines, and multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) routers that require on-site IT specialists to manage. Unlike traditional WANs, SD-WAN provides the agility to quickly scale up or down bandwidth to fit changing network needs. This enables organizations to deploy new revenue-generating services in days rather than months and ensures that critical business applications always have an optimal path for delivery.

Choose an SD-WAN provider that offers centralized management and visibility through easy-to-use tools that allow you to monitor the entire network. You’ll want to make sure you can define primary and secondary pathways, control bandwidth allocation, automate dynamic pathway selection and load sharing, and have access to monitoring and reporting.

Look for an SD-WAN solution provider that can provide security services to protect your network from cyber threats. Ask about their security architecture and features, such as distributed, Cloud-native firewalls, that help prevent malicious attacks and enforce access policies to keep your information secure.

Choosing a managed SD-WAN solution provider allows you to optimize your remote connectivity and maximize efficiency while freeing up time for IT teams to focus on other priorities. The right partner can assess your network’s unique needs, implement a cost-effective solution, and provide ongoing support that ensures you have the agility to meet evolving business requirements.

Improved Performance

An SD-WAN solution offers high network resiliency and performance, increasing agility and lowering costs. Enterprise businesses must often connect leased lines, broadband Internet, and other connectivity options across multiple locations, branch offices, and remote users. The goal is to ensure maximum uptime, secure data access, and compliance with business policies. A single hour of downtime can cost an organization $300,000 or more in lost revenue, productivity, and remediation costs.

Using an Internet underlay, SD-WAN prioritizes traffic based on business policies and selects the best path to the cloud or SaaS applications. This can eliminate the need for expensive routers or MPLS connections. It also reduces overall IT costs by leveraging readily available Internet connections to deliver data to corporate networks.

Look for a managed SD-WAN provider that can provide you with centralized management tools and a streamlined user experience. This can make overseeing your connectivity and managing your security much more accessible for IT teams, reducing their workloads and enabling them to spend more time on strategic projects.

Choose a managed service provider that offers local support technicians to help resolve issues. This will ensure you have quick and easy access to experts to help determine your problems quickly and efficiently. Find out if your managed service provider has an SLA (service-level agreement) and their policy management and escalation process.