Today, work-from-anywhere strategies are becoming more permanent as employees are dispersed over different geographic locations. This new way of working presents a different, diverse set of network challenges including prioritizing network traffic in branch offices and at home, security risks from personal, untrusted devices, sub-optimal traffic flow, inconsistent business application performance, and more.
Source: BrandPost: Is Your Network Working for You in Today’s Changing Environment?
Remote users are most affected with insufficient access to critical business applications decreasing business efficiency and productivity, particularly heavily used collaboration and video conference resources like Microsoft 365 applications, Microsoft Teams and WebEx, along with other critical SaaS applications like Salesforce.com, for example.
What is driving businesses to SD-WAN
- Branch networking modernization
Business expansion can be one of the most significant company objectives. However, opening new branches and office locations can have dramatic changes to the network including latency, packet loss, or downtime. Adding more branches not only hinders traffic prioritization, but it can be costly and difficult to manage each branch, especially for a lean IT team. Older methods reliant on physical devices required having the staff with the right expertise to travel to locations to setup edge networking devices, connect them to the network and maintain them in an ongoing basis.
SD-WAN simplifies branch infrastructure by consolidating edge services into one platform with greater visibility, control, and security. Users benefit from improved bandwidth and stability of network connections, while operational costs and centralized management help improve overall user experience.
- Cloud adoption & transition
According to research from Gartner, enterprise IT spending on public cloud computing will increase 18% in 2021. This research further demonstrates how the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing companies to consider cloud computing as they start focusing on optimizing IT costs, securing their remote workforces, and maximizing productivity. With more companies migrating to the cloud, organizations must have the proper network in place to connect to their cloud services and support the increased network traffic.
With SD-WAN, networks can ensure the capacity and reliability to allow thin client execution and connection to cloud-based applications. Through strong encryption, application-level security politics and data segmentation, SD-WAN can ensure a company’s network is well protected.
- Application performance assurance
As organizations adopt a more remote workforce, employees must be able to access critical business applications, especially when they are away from their traditional workplace. For healthcare facilities, users need to securely access patient records and doctors need to stay connected with their patients. Financial companies need to access confidential credit card and banking information and client personal records. Educational institutions need robust, secure communication and collaboration tools for distance learning. Many remote employees are connecting from home using consumer-grade devices and limited bandwidth can impede application performance, which affects business productivity and efficiency.
SD-WAN solves this issue with real-time path selection, edge routing, end-to-end QoS, and WAN optimization, plus available LTE failover for coverage when carrier links go down. This solution increases the performance and reliability of traditional enterprise applications, SaaS applications, and virtual desktops over any network.
Why RapidScale SD-WAN
RapidScale’s SD-WAN delivers innovation and digital transformation to customers. This cloud-delivered offering enables a more agile network that better supports the transition to the cloud. SD-WAN enables organizations to leverage lower-cost WAN links and to use any connection type. Users benefit from the performance and reliability that they expect from a private network.
Furthermore, this cloud-based solution optimizes access and enables a seamless migration to the cloud with security for your cloud applications. Users also can chain multiple services to the traffic flow. SD-WAN ensures application performance and reliability, so you get an optimal user experience. Application uptime over the WAN is enhanced for both cloud-hosted applications and those in the corporate data center.
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