No longer just a buzzworthy emerging technology, investment in SD-WAN is expected to see major growth in the coming years. These are the five advantages causing more and more enterprises to take notice of SD-WAN.
Software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) is expected to take huge leaps in the next few years — Gartner has predicted that investment in the technology will grow to $1.3 billion by 2020. But some observers note that, exciting as this future growth will be, SD-WAN adoption among enterprises at the moment is actually rather sluggish. What’s the problem? The networking paradigm has so many diverse potential benefits that enterprises don’t fully understand what they’re being sold on.
Luckily, we’re here to set the record straight by evaluating all the many advantages offered by SD-WAN and what kinds of business needs they meet. Here are the top five essential benefits of implementing SD-WAN infrastructure in your enterprise.
1. Lower Costs in the Age of the Cloud
The rise of cloud networks has made much of the traditional multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) technology used to convey information between geographically disparate branches of a company obsolete. You could continue to use these networks if you wanted, but doing so isn’t cheap. With SDN, enterprise IT teams can take their regular broadband and use it to create a high-performance enterprise solution, making interdepartmental communication both cheaper and more efficient.
2. Better Security
Cybersecurity is easily the top priority for IT professionals in the current era — practically any survey of IT leadership will tell you that. A majority (56%) of organizations believe that SDN will bring them better security, while nearly half (47%) of those who did adopt SDN tools cited security as a primary reason, according to a report from Verizon. As enterprise networks become more complex and exist in more environments at once, SD-WAN offers security teams the flexibility and agility needed to respond to modern threats.
3. Better Provisioning Times
Provisioning is one aspect of modern IT that has not been improved by the advent of the cloud and other dominant technologies. SD-WAN can cut into long provisioning times and save money by using less expensive broadband circuits instead of buying additional lines to meet demand. Again, if your enterprise needs to sustain connections between distant branches, SD-WAN brings a serious advantage: Gartner research suggests it could reduce the time spent provisioning network changes for various branches by 50-80%.
4. It’s Perfect for Edge Computing
Looking to take full advantage of the edge? There’s no better paradigm than SDN, largely because of the benefits we’ve already cited. Edge computing requires that computing resources be available at-hand for many disparate branches of an enterprise, rather than traveling back and forth from a centralized control center. Achieving this can come at a cost if you’re using a network solution that doesn’t offer exceptional cost-efficiency, availability, and performance like SD-WAN does.
5. Higher Quality Transfer
Again, if you’ve got mission-critical applications that demand high performance at all times — like IoT devices at the edge of a network might, for instance — an SD-WAN can help you out. The technology supports dynamic path selection, which means that its controller can automatically identify and use the best path for specific application traffic. That takes plenty of work off of IT managers hands by quickly pinpointing potential congestion issues and proactively allocating traffic to the most appropriate routes.
These advantages could prove nothing short of groundbreaking for your enterprise’s IT needs, but converting your network is not an easy task. Whether a switch to SDN is the best, most cost-efficient choice for your business isn’t always obvious. Luckily, you can rely on the experts at Turn-Key Technologies to help you find the best networking solution moving forward, as well as provide a managed service program to help you implement it.
Our long list of industry accolades and three decades of experience make us a powerful ally for your business as it transitions to next-generation networking solutions like SD-WAN. We can step in to ensure that this important upgrade to your infrastructure doesn’t interrupt the critical day-to-day work of your in-house IT team. Our managed services programs can improve their networks without distracting them from their daily tasks.