Business Benefits of SD-WAN

By Emily Pribanic - Published on April 20, 2018
Business Benefits of SD-WAN

What is SD-WAN and what are the benefits it can offer your company?

SD-WAN offers companies many benefits, especially when compared to traditional WAN or MPLS solutions.

What exactly is SD-WAN? Well, SD-WAN stands for Software-Defined Wide-Area Networking. How SD-WAN works is by offering a simplified, cost-effective and flexible alternative to traditional WAN solutions. Now you may be asking why choose SD-WAN? Well because it improves the performance of on-premise and cloud applications. There are many advantages of SD-WAN and companies are noticing this. It’s estimated that by 2020, company spending on SD-WAN will exceed $1.3 billion.

Business Benefits of SD-WAN

One of the major advantages SD-WAN offers is reduced costs. When it comes to SD-WAN vs MPLS, SD-WAN is cheaper for companies compared to the MPLS connected network. Although MPLS has been very dependable for years, it’s expensive and causes some companies to sacrifice performance for price. SD-WAN is less expensive because it reduces reliance on expensive lines, while still offering excellent network performance. SD-WAN allows companies to leverage all available network connections to their full capacity which facilitates the best performance of applications that are critical to the company’s success. This also reduces costs associated with lost productivity due to an unstable network. SD-WAN also prevents lost productivity due to the backup connections that are constantly being employed.

Understanding SD-WAN and how it can benefit your company will allow your company to improve its provisioning times. There are many challenges associated with provisioning new branch office networks, but an SD-WAN solution enables companies to use less expensive broadband networks, allowing them to be provisioned almost instantly. This is because an SD-WAN configuration is simplified, orchestrated and rapid. SD-WAN is so rapid that it is estimated that this solution cuts provisioning times by up to 80%.

Making changes to network configurations used to require manual configurations being installed and created, with an on-site technician to perform these changes. This was very expensive, time-consuming and caused many companies to experience network downtime and outages. With SD-WAN performance, though, companies can now rapidly deploy their WAN services without the need of an on-site technician. SD-WAN reduces the need for manual configuration of devices and is much simpler than its WAN counterpart. SD-WAN makes it easy for companies to adjust their bandwidth as the business requirements evolve, providing them with the agility they need to stay ahead of the competition.

Another major benefit of SD-WAN is that it offers companies stronger security. It is estimated that by 2020, worldwide spending on information security will top $113 billion. SD-WAN outperforms traditional WAN solutions in the security department due to its built-in security protocols. SD-WAN solutions have encryption capabilities built right in to ensure that only authorized users can access and view confidential corporate assets. SD-WAN also allows companies to notify the network on how certain types of traffic should be handled which keeps high-risk traffic from ever entering the network.

Compared to MPLS and traditional WAN networks, SD-WAN offers higher quality transfers. IT environments are rapidly becoming more complex which is making network performance increasingly necessary to be able to handle critical workloads. SD-WAN solutions support a dynamic path selection and can provide applications, that need it, the high performance, high reliability and high quality that they require to deliver the user experience that is expected. With an SD-WAN solution being able to support dynamic path solutions, it can determine the most appropriate path for any application, reducing congestion points by diverting traffic to alternative routes.

Has your company implemented SD-WAN or are you still using the traditional WAN or MPLS solutions? If you haven’t implemented this new network configuration in your company yet, it’s time to start thinking about making the switch.

Emily Pribanic | Emily is a graduate of the University of North Texas. She has her B.A. in Advertising with a concentration in Copywriting. Emily has been writing since she was young and has a creative imagination. She lives in Dallas, Texas with her family and two cats.

Emily Pribanic | Emily is a graduate of the University of North Texas. She has her B.A. in Advertising with a concentration in Copywriting. Emily has been writing s...

Related Posts