So, what’s the role of SD-WAN in current COVID 19 pandemic?
Over the past few weeks, it’s an understatement to say that the
COVID-19 pandemic has changed every facet of our lives.
Organisations everywhere, including businesses, educational
institutions, and public venues such as airports and stadiums, are
all adapting to these times. The COVID-19 pandemic has now
forced nearly every country worldwide to rethink their strategies,
business continuity plans and their readiness for such pandemics
in future.
Many organisations have either recommended or mandated
employees to work from home. The work from home users need
to access their corporate applications with the same high-quality
experience as they would have from their office. It is a must now
for an organisation to empower its employees to carry out
business activities and to ensure business continuity. Going
forward, this will permanently change the way we work, learn to
connect, worship and simply how we live & connect in community
with each other.
What will change and why SD-WAN?
Organisations would increasingly adopt SD-WAN for the home
networks to support their remote workforce, given the SD-WAN
software-defined approach and benefits. As the network usage
increases, the WAN struggles to keep up with demands from
users and bandwidth-hungry applications. Inevitably, applications
become slow and unreliable, causing frustration and agitation to
both the business and their customers. Pursuing and gaining the
maximum advantage out of wide-area networks (WANs) has
become a business imperative.
Also, cloud-hosted applications would raise the stakes for edge
network performance; enterprises would require even greater
WAN reliability, agility and performance to leverage the cloud’s
economies of scale. They must turn to SD-WANs to achieve CapEx
and OpEx savings, reduce complexity and be secure.
Author – Yougender Kumar
Vice President
VIS Global
Yougender is a visionary leader having strong business acumen with proven record of delivering high growth, turning underperforming businesses, streamlining operations, improving systems & procedures and building high performing teams. He has spent more than 25 years in diverse leadership positions in companies like Cisco Systems, Airtel, Avaya Global, Tata Telecom leading large-scale technical and transformational global programs that focus on delivering business outcomes. Yougender joined VIS Global in 2019, a technology services company, to drive Customer Success and Digital Engagement. If you are interested in discussing these challenges and the way forward, you can get in touch with Yougender at
yougender.kumar@visglobal.com.au
What are the benefits of SD-WAN?
Speed to market
The technology has been built on the premise that as organisations undergo digital transformation, they need a networking solution that can adapt quickly. SD- WAN allows for changes to be made immediately and centrally to an entire system or network at one time all through a single interface with great ease.
Cost savings
Connecting geographically dispersed offices or branches can hit IT budgets hard and be inordinately expensive to maintain. SD-WAN allows a business to expand its network more efficiently, circumventing its reliance on traditional providers.
A particularly appealing characteristic of SD-WAN is its policy-controlled environment, which enables businesses to manage multiple types of connections. For example, it could ensure that an MPLS virtual
private network (VPN) always has priority for network connectivity, while giving secondary priority to high-bandwidth traffic such as video. An SD-WAN solution also allows for dynamic path selection, early detection
of congestion points resulting in optimised load balancing so that high-quality data transfer is maintained.
Zero-Touch Provisioning and Deployment
SDWAN technology enables Provisioning and deployment of SDWAN in the branch very fast with zero-touch, which makes it simple. Physical appliances are configured before shipping and virtual appliance images are burned before posting so that in many cases, organisations do not even need technical personnel physically in the branch to do the SD-WAN install. All administration and reporting take place centrally managed SDWAN controller.
Performance Blind Spots
Gain unprecedented visibility into network and application performance for proactive management and ongoing innovation.
Reduced MPLS Dependency
Augment MPLS links with less expensive links by transforming abundant, affordable broadband bandwidth to high-quality enterprise class links with the four nines reliability expected from MPLS.