The workforce is changing.
We're more mobile, connected, and innovative than ever, with countless collaboration tools to run, omnichannel strategies to manage, and remote workforces to support. It's no wonder that forward-thinking organisations are beginning to look at how they can bridge the gaps in their unified collaboration and communication systems.
As the business application marketplace grows, driven by the demand for Software as a Service and workforce agility, firms with their eye on the cloud need a way to provide their employees with the exceptional user experience they expect. SD-WAN (Software Defined WAN) tech offers a simple and elegant solution for designing and managing the networks that support the growing bandwidth needs of cloud communications.
How Does SD-WAN Work for the Cloud Community?
SD-WAN technology offers today's companies all the benefits that they'd expect from Software-defined networking, in the Wide Area Network environment. By automating complicated things like network management and deployment, SD-WAN streamlines cloud communication with accelerated service delivery, improved performance, and better availability - all for a lower cost of ownership too.
SD-WAN systems work by measuring the essential traffic metrics in your network to protect against problems like packet loss and jitter. By proactively managing your network, SD-WAN can respond quickly to real-time network conditions and select the optimal path for your cloud communication data packets. The result is a better experience for users, and end-customers alike.
The Benefits of SD-WAN for a Cloud Comms Strategy
Sales of SD-WAN technology is expected to skyrocket in coming years. In fact, with a 69% CAGR, SD-WAN could be worth $8.05 billion by 2021, and it's easy to see why. This technology offers a range of incredible financial and operational benefits, including:
- Better costs: If your cloud strategy aims to reduce costs, then SD-WAN is a great addition. Internet links are far less expensive than carrier MPLS connections, which often come attached to restrictive contracts
- Great reliability: SD-WAN technology offers exceptional resiliency when you want to keep your communication strategy up and running no matter what. Because SD-WAN allows you to prioritise performance for the most important cloud applications, you won't have to worry as much about latency, packet loss, and jitter
- Better agility: SD-WAN routers combine the bandwidth of various WAN connections, making them more agile and efficient. For real-time network traffic - the kind you deal with through your cloud communications and VoIP, SD-WAN ensures you can easily add or remove multiple connections as needed, to support stronger performance throughout your network
- Stronger performance: SD-WAN technology uses the same concepts as cloud communications strategies. Essentially, with SD-WAN, you're using the internet to create high-performance, secure connections that eliminate the penalties of MPLS networks. With SD-WAN, you get your business applications cost-effectively and benefit from well-optimised Software as a Service and cloud solutions
- Security: SD-WAN can improve your network security by encrypting the WAN traffic you handle as it moves from one destination to another. This means that you not only get better communication services but more secure solutions too. Additionally, SD-WAN can segment the traffic you handle over your cloud comms so that if something does go wrong, the damage you experience will be as minimal as possible
SD-WAN even makes your business more efficient with automation strategies and greater simplicity. The best SD-WAN services can even give you a single and unified view of your comms from a single-pane-of-glass cloud console, for hybrid management of cloud networks, branch LANs, and more.
