The Benefits of SD-WAN for a Growing Business
Growing businesses need to be selective with the types of technology they use. But there are many benefits of SD-WAN technology that small businesses and growing businesses can’t afford to overlook. SD-WAN technology makes it easier for an organization to manage its wide area network, improving productivity, management and maintenance. And while there are many SD-WAN services, a managed services provider can help an organization find the right technology for it.
Let’s look at the following critical SD-WAN benefits.
1. Lower cost of ownership
SD-WANs make it possible to connect multiple broadband connections to provide everything that an organization needs for its connectivity. This is opposed to investing in more expensive network architecture. SD-WANs may cost a little more to initially set up, but they are going to have a lower cost of ownership. Because SD-WANs can streamline and improve maintenance, administration and optimization, they further reduce the cost of expenses.
A reduced cost of ownership makes a growing business more agile. A business is able to invest in other areas of their technology for long-term improvement and can further future-proof their technologies without wasting money on interim advancements. For moderately sized businesses, the cost of upgrading technology periodically can be enough to make growth difficult.
2. Enhanced elasticity for growth.
One of the major advantages of an SD-WAN is that it is scalable. When organizations are poised for growth, it becomes important to be able to scale at any time according to need. While an organization can create architecture to projected scale, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the organization is going to need that architecture in the future. It might need those expenses immediately, and then lack them since the only plans were for future growth.
Enhanced scalability means the organization can choose to grow its network architecture when it needs to – and it means that the company is agile and able to pivot when it is required.
3. Redundancy and reduced downtime.
SD-WAN architecture leverages and optimizes redundant edge devices and circuits. As organizations grow, it’s incredibly important to reduce downtime. Companies need to be reliable for the customers and vendors that they are picking up, and they need to be able to rely on their network as they build their processes. By improving upon downtime, companies can build up their own reliability, and ensure that their employees always have the technology they need.
As the company grows, this redundancy becomes even more important – supporting the system’s infrastructure as it becomes mired in growing complexity. Today’s systems need to rely on a significant number of moving parts, and having this redundancy and reliability in place becomes critical.
4. Increased speeds.
SD-WANs offer enhanced speeds and superior network performance, which also makes it easier to create a reliable, productive and efficient network. Companies today are increasingly relying upon their Internet speeds for basic communication.
From Slack or MS Teams channels to video conferencing, companies need to be able to rely upon their connectivity and their bandwidth or employees can’t work effectively together. An SD-WAN can help an organization achieve this.
5. Superior security.
Organizations today need to be concerned about security. While security has always been a concern in the past, there are more risks and vulnerabilities today. Small to midsized businesses are most frequently being targeted, and companies can be particularly vulnerable when they are making a transition such as major growth.
Companies need to protect their security to remain in compliance with many laws, and there are additional standards (such as PCI CSS) that must be met. An SD-WAN provides greater visibility, control and security. Through the SD-WAN, all data flowing through the network can be encrypted and protected.
6. Better application performance.
Many business-critical applications today are operating on hybrid or multi-clouds. In addition, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications adoption is increasing. And that means that if a company isn’t able to utilize its network resources competently it may not be able to use its applications well. SD-WANs provide the network resources that applications need to operate more effectively, in turn improving the productivity of everyone within the organization. If businesses are finding that their application performance is faltering, they may want to consider installing an SD-WAN to deliver resources more consistently and more reliably.
SD-WANs can even prioritize traffic within the network so that the most critical applications within the most critical departments get what they need first. This is especially important when organizations are experiencing unusual amounts of traffic or activity.
There are many other SD-WAN benefits for businesses that are entering into a growth cycle. With technology being as intrinsic to modern businesses as it is, anything that can improve upon all levels of technology within a network should be explored.
How does SD-WAN work? For more information about whether an SD-WAN is right for your organization, contact the experts at Red River.
