How to simplify your WAN and deliver services from the cloud

The need for speed while creating value

Any enterprise operating today has multiple kinds of people accessing its network. Think about your own organization; before the pandemic, your office building was likely teeming with employees, contractors, vendors, maintenance crew, sales reps and guests. And they’re more frequently on mobile. Add new digital transformation strategies and technologies deployed needed to address powerful market trends, and traditional network technologies are struggling to keep up.

Can last century’s workhorse keep up in the modern age?

Multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) based networks have been the standard for decades. MPLS are reliable for real-time communications and offer pre-determined, highly efficient bandwidth utilization for routing IP traffic on the internet.

Traditionally, they worked great. But now, with increased adoption of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS), MPLS are becoming more expensive, complex and difficult to manage.

Today’s CIOs seek better solutions

Say you’re the CIO of a multi-national retailer. You have store locations all over the world.

Some of your responsibilities include ensuring your enterprise can keep up with inventory and warehouse management, stocking optimization and various data needs at thousands of your stores.

You’re also responsible for making sure your customers enjoy fast, easy and personalized digital experiences like online ordering, real-time order tracking for curbside or in-store pick-up.

But as your networking traffic increases dramatically to support these initiatives—not to mention a growing list of cloud-based applications—you’re challenged with bandwidth as well as the reliability, speed and flexibility of the network to adapt to your changing requirements.

So, how do you modernize your network as more and more of your applications migrate to the cloud? How can you reduce the number of appliances at each store location? And how do you boost agility and responsiveness and make change simple?

According to IDC, secure and seamless connection to cloud applications, the ability to improve performance of cloud apps and the flexibility to automate and simplify management of WAN infrastructure are what’s driving SD-WAN adoption among companies striving to become digital enterprises.

And enterprises are listening. More and more, they’re using SD-WAN to enhance their WANs and further enable digital transformation. Why? Four reasons:

1. SD-WAN offers flexibility and optimizes cloud application performance while also leveraging lower cost internet broadband connections that can be deployed quickly.

2. SD-WAN networks offer centralized and simple management and are network and transport independent.

3. SD-WAN combines the economics and flexibility of a hybrid WAN with the deployment speed and low maintenance of a cloud-based service.

4. SD-WAN includes policy-based network-wide application performance, visibility and control while dramatically simplifying the WAN by delivering services from the cloud to branch locations.

According to Gartner, “By 2024, to enhance agility and support for cloud applications, 60% of enterprises will have implemented SD-WAN, compared with about 30% in 2020.”

If your organization is ready to make the change, what should you look for in an SD-WAN service partner?

End-to-end lifecycle services with broad geographic are just the beginning. With SD-WAN, you need a partner with a proven approach to deploying this network transformation and expertise across a broad assortment of the leading providers to not only help you get the best solution for your needs but deliver the experience your customers expect.