Looking to upgrade your network? When searching for a cloud connectivity solution, SD-WAN delivers for many businesses thanks to its ability to boost network performance, ensure security and many other valuable benefits.
What is SD-WAN?
SD-WAN is short for software-defined wide area network, and it allows an engineer to manage a network via a cloud-based interface.
To better understand SD-WAN, let’s examine a basic network system like the local area network, or LAN. A typical LAN is essentially your Wi-Fi at home, with everything from your computer to your phone connected to it. Then there are wide area networks, or WANs, that connect offices and companies around the world. WANs are used for private line (PL) collaboration among enterprise users, clients, suppliers and partners.
The latest evolution of WAN, SD-WAN, brings your WAN and Internet connections together where you can direct traffic through a cloud-based management server, as opposed to through the hardware.
This is especially important in geographically-distributed and remote office environments. SD-WAN makes it easy for IT to control one virtual network under a single, common command. And with a centralized management system, comes specialized features.
SD-WAN Features
1. Quality of Service
Quality of Service or QoS is the ability to improve overall network performance through the management of data traffic, packet loss and latency. SD-WAN provides QoS by monitoring the use of bandwidth and data flow and automatically selects the best path by using preset parameters setup by an engineer.
2. Automatic VPN Tunnels
SD-WAN can create VPN tunnels across your Internet, MPLS and other lines securely. With automatic VPN tunnels you spend less time configuring site-to-site tunnels since you can set up a tunnel simply through the central management system.
3. Forward Error Correction
Are corrupt packets slowing down your network performance? SD-WAN’s forward error correction feature allows the reconstruction of missing or corrupted packets without retransmitting them. In turn, this helps improve network performance.
While SD-WAN comes with many practical features, there are also many benefits to consider as well.
Benefits of SD-WAN
1. Control Your Network Traffic
Through the cloud-based applications programming interface (API), SD-WAN lets you prioritize your most important tasks, including VoIP and other real-time applications. This allows you to make sure that all necessary applications are running at optimal speeds for the best experience. With more control over your traffic, you can maximize your business efficiency too.
2. Add Security
Through SD-WAN, your entire WAN is protected by a centralized firewall or encryption (or both) to control and manage data. Encryption ensures secure data transmission over public networks by encoding all your information to maximize privacy.
3. Maximize Bandwidth
Maximize your Internet and data speed by combining the bandwidth from any ISP through multiple connections via fiber, cable, etc. Through this setup, your network will improve in performance with combined upload and download speeds, optimizing your overall experience and productivity.
4. Build Network Redundancy
SD-WAN lets you create a failover for your business through multiple connections including fiber, T1, LTE and other network connections. Building network redundancy ensures that your business is always connected. With failover, you can maintain your session traffic and security, not to mention your users will build trust with you and love your reliability.
SD-WAN is an incredibly robust solution that’s easy to set up and provides ongoing benefits for your business. So what’s holding you back?
