Today’s networks need to be fast, more expansive and create agile connections between end users and their applications. Future-proofing your business by switching over to a software defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) will give you full control from a single pane of glass, more so than a traditional WAN setup. No matter what industry you are in, SD-WAN will be a boost to your network infrastructure, especially since technology continues to change the way we do business. Switching to an SD-WAN will enhance overall performance, visibility, up-time and security controls.
Stop Sacrificing Performance for Security
Now more than ever, it is important to ensure that your business keeps up with the speed of the game but in our quest to do more with less, are we sacrificing the security of the network? Downtime or a lagging connection can cost money and lost productivity Switching to an SD-WAN setup will allow organizations to ensure that they are keeping their networks running efficiently, without sacrificing security in the process. By using SD-WAN to directly connect to cloud-based applications, you can ensure optimal up-time, availability and security 24/7.
An example of enhancing security without sacrificing performance, would be implementing micro-segmentation utilizing SD-WAN. Micro-segmentation takes the traditional three tier network approach and multiples its effectiveness. By setting software defined policies around new applications or devices entering your network, you can define which environment everything will live in. For example, if you have an application that is for onboarding clients, but it needs special security obligations that need to be in place, you would write those rulesets into your SD-WAN. The policy will then auto detect this type of application and place it in its appropriate segment, away from any other tiers. Organizations can take advantage of these same rules for onboarding new employees and guests on the network.
Visibility is Key
We covered earlier in this post that it is paramount that all applications on the network operate effectively and efficiently to avoid any potential downtime, since they cannot be profitable when they cannot connect. By using Dynamic Policy rules within an SD-WAN you will be able to set thresholds on things like latency, throughput, packet loss and create alerts or actions for each to quickly undermine any network outages that may be lurking. This allows total visibility on the networks and allows teams to see any performance issues across the SD-WAN.
Having enough time to make decisions on new technologies is vital to the onboarding process. Will this new solution work with your existing network and application set up? Another great benefit of SD-WAN is the 3rd party integration functionality logic built in. This will allow organizations to migrate to a full SD-WAN at their own pace.
Preparing for the future is always necessary when IT planning. 2019 is a transformative year for enterprise networking. SD-WAN Network operators will be supporting dramatically greater device density and data throughput, in addition to receiving new analytics about their infrastructure use from the network itself. Meanwhile, network engineers will be more effective, due to centralized management tools and machine intelligence.
Together, these new features will make networks even more important assets that businesses will leverage in ways that we have not yet begun to realize.
