As businesses respond to the logistical impacts of the pandemic, digital transformation continues to accelerate, pushing for a greater number of enterprises to transition to the cloud. Businesses witnessing this shift are understanding the importance of mobilising their physically disaggregated workforces, by equipping their businesses with infrastructure that empowers their at-home or hybrid employees. Users are now accessing workplace applications from the cloud instead of traditional corporate data centres, which has seen businesses experience a number of benefits through the power of SD-WAN. But what is SD-WAN, and exactly how is it helping organisations improve their operations?
Read on to discover how SD-WAN is helping enterprises improve their performance through better networking.
What is SD-WAN?
A software-defined wide area network or SD-WAN is a virtual WAN architecture that allows for administrators to control the connectivity, access and service between organisational data centres and end-users. SD-WAN works to simplify the management and performance of a network by decoupling the network hardware from its control mechanism. This concept operates in a similar way to how software-defined networking implements virtualisation technology to improve data centre management and operation. The SD-WAN architecture is used to grant remote users access to an organisation’s applications and files.
What Are the Benefits of SD-WAN Over Traditional Networks?
SD-WAN has a number of key advantages over traditional networks including its significantly cheaper cost across MPLS, 4G, 5G and other connection types for networks. Since ISPs offer their customers less specific hardware, companies that opt to build WAN to their specifications are paying for specialised services.
SD-WANs also offer a better allocation and distribution of bandwidth, as data can be filtered through VPNs, which also offers better security through end-to-end data encryption and a manageable firewall. Given that SD-WANs are cloud based, it also means that they can be used across geographically disparate regions, allowing larger enterprises to implement centralised, uniform policies across their international operations’ centres.
How is it Helping Businesses?
As workforces have become more distributed, businesses have become more reliant on SaaS, the cloud, and greater bandwidth. As such, SD-WAN solutions are designed to help businesses improve management across the board in light of present demands. The key areas of benefit include:
- Improved branch level deployment
- Security across the entire enterprise network
- Improved data routing
- Increased network flexibility
- Significant cost savings
These separate benefits translate into a saving that can amount to approximately $600,000 – $1,200,000 depending on the size of the business and specific nature of improvements made.
What’s Available in the Market?
While there are a number of SD-WAN solution providers available in the market, few match service offering and scalability of Versa networks. Versa network SD-WAN solutions including the Versa OS, Versa Secure Access zero-trust network architecture, Versa Director virtualisation platform and Versa Titan device management software provide a comprehensive software package designed to meet the needs of any small or global scale enterprise.
If your organisation is interested in more information about how SD-WANs can help improve the capability of your enterprise or is interested in learning how a Versa network solution can help them, speak to a member of our team at IDS today.
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