> SD-WAN. Why You Should Care Right Now.

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SD-WAN. Why You Should Care Right Now.

Discover how SD-WAN makes managing your business network easier and more cost-effective. Benefits include: faster deployment times and time to market, better optimization and control of application performance and easier control of security and compliance.

 

Building out an efficient IT network is not easy, period. Stitching together various branches, offices, and datacentres to ensure proper operation everywhere is a continuous battle for IT administrators. With the addition of cloud infrastructure and SaaS offerings to most business’s operations – it’s become even more difficult to manage performance, availability, and cost.

In the past, connecting office and branch locations to both datacentre resources as well as the Internet usually meant connecting each branch office to the datacentre using expensive private WAN connections.  Complexities typically included routing all traffic (even Internet) through the datacentre, resulting in not just more expensive connections for each location, but slow traffic flow and reduced user experience.

Any changes to the network, like upgrades to a location’s network, or adding/changing cloud and datacentre resources, required manual intervention and re-architecture, re-configuration, and often even re-installation at each location. Factor in all the cost, downtime, and potential for error those activities bring – it’s not anyone’s ideal situation.

Is this still your IT reality today? It’s time for a change. Introducing, SD-WAN.

SD-WAN: Next generation technology that makes things easier.  

SD-WAN is an attempt to finally make building and managing multiple locations and connections easy by centralizing the management of the entire network and decoupling provisioning from the physical devices and connections at each location. SD-WAN treats internet, MPLS, 4G, 5G, and other connectivity types agnostically. This puts the control back in the hands of the user rather than your telco providers. It acts as a virtual control overlay that allows you to configure, deploy, and automate network changes throughout your network and locations, all from a single control panel.

SD-WAN: So What?

What does this all really mean? By centralizing control, SD-WAN isn’t just a newer, more modern way of doing things –  it delivers some real business outcomes.

Faster deployment times and times to market: bring up new locations or new resources, such as datacentres or cloud resources, in days instead of months

Better optimization and control of application performance, improved user experience: by using SD-WAN it becomes easier to tweak control, priority, and quality of service for different locations and applications, and connection types more cost effectively, delivering costs savings on network infrastructure

Easier control of security and compliance: SD-WAN makes it easier to intelligently manage securing of links between various locations and applications while avoiding the need to deploy and manage/configure/redeploy edge security devices as security and compliance needs change.

Life is hard enough. Simplify with SD-WAN.

Overall, SD-WAN makes managing your business network easier and more cost-effective, whether you’re growing locations, moving locations, or adding/removing resources. It enables the ability to adapt and change your IT strategy with more speed and less expense than ever before, enabling speed to market and reduced costs for evolving your business and managing security and compliance.

Whatever your industry or market, your business and IT team stand to benefit from exploring SD-WAN. With the right partner and technology, SD-WAN gives any enterprise the ability to make IT architecture faster, cheaper, and easier to manage, making your business quicker and more responsive.

Finally, it’s easy.

 

Written by: Nabeel Sherif

Nabeel has spent his career working in product development/innovation, business planning, and change management for the ICT sector, as well as in consumer and industrial electronics. Over the past 20 years, Nabeel has launched dozens of new ICT products and services around the globe, from metropolitan WiFi and Enterprise & Industrial networks to fully automated cloud IT infrastructure and applications.

Additionally, Nabeel is a Curriculum Lead and Instructor at the University of Toronto (U of T) School of Continuing Studies. He is the owner/creator and lecturer for U of T’s Cloud Computing Certificate program and President of Player 2 Technology Solutions, a consultancy specializing in product strategy and network architecture for ICT businesses. He is also Cloud Specialist at TeraGo Networks and has spent most of his career in technology conceptualizing, developing, marketing, and evangelizing computing and communications products for a variety of ICT providers and global electronics manufacturers. For the past 15 years, his focus has been in developing and creating the next generation of services and products in hosting, cloud computing, data centre services, and application networks.

He holds a B.Sc (Hon) from the University of Ottawa, an MBA from Queen’s University, and has designed and managed dozens of communications products and hundreds of global networks for the past two decades.