Business networks to witness greater agility with SD-WAN

Organizations are increasingly embracing digital transformation to keep pace with emerging market trends, fluctuating customer demands, and increased competition. But traditional network architectures were not built to handle the workloads and complexities of most digital transformation initiatives. More troubling is that business-critical services are also often distributed across multiple clouds, which can compromise network performance further, especially at branch locations.

SD-WAN benefits businesses by reducing overhead costs and increasing network performance. SD-WAN solutions cut out expensive routing and cut down on hardware costs while offering your business the flexibility to access multi-cloud services. Businesses are adopting SD-WAN to reduce overhead and support new applications and services resulting from digital transformation. This innovative technology not only simplifies the management and operation of a WAN but also delivers a number of real-world business benefits.

Digital transformation is a double-edged sword. While it can improve customer satisfaction and extend market reach, it can also expose an organization to significant security risks. The good news is many SD-WAN solutions offer built-in security. However, the basic firewall and VPN functions provided by most SD-WAN solutions are often not enough.

Digital transformation initiatives can add layers of complexity to a network. The result is not only a risk of poor network performance, but over-taxed IT teams and the need for locating onsite personnel at remote sites to manage the local IT infrastructure. Fortunately, SD-WAN can ease the IT burden by simplifying WAN infrastructure, using broadband to off-load non-critical business apps, automating monitoring tasks, and managing traffic through a centralized controller. Consider looking for a SD-WAN solution that can also integrate into the local branch infrastructure to drive security and management deep into the local LAN.

Organizations are increasingly adopting cloud services. The good news is that SD-WAN enables direct cloud access at the remote branch, thereby eliminating backhauling traffic – routing all cloud and branch office traffic through the data center – meaning that workers can directly access cloud applications regardless of location without burdening the core network with additional traffic to manage and secure. What’s more, SD-WAN improves cloud application performance by prioritizing business critical applications and enabling branches to directly communicate to the Internet.

SD-WAN functionality can be extended deep into the local branch LAN to ensure that security and network functionality can protect locally deployed devices and secure direct connections to SaaS applications and other online resources

Deepak Sahu, President & CEO, VARINDIA