What's so great about SD-WAN? It's not switching to a different provider. It's about reducing the overall attack surface and improving bandwidth efficiency. There are many reasons to use SD-WAN for your business. Hopefully, you'll better learn about SD-WAN by the end of this article.
Delivers superior application quality of experience
SD-WAN can replace MPLS backhaul and deliver the ultimate application performance while providing centralized management. Conventional MPLS transport services are often rigid and have extended lead times, causing companies to either overprovision capacity or severely limit performance due to bandwidth constraints. Business-driven SD-WAN eliminates such problems and enhances business agility by making it easy to leverage bandwidth. It can also run the entire business on shared public broadband. Conventional MPLS backhauling clouds will impact application performance, add to costs, compromise security and limit visibility.
While primary SD-WAN offerings can provide zero-touch provisioning, business-driven SD-WAN can support complete end-to-end orchestration of all WAN edge functions. This ensures minimal human error and enables rapid changes to address business needs. Business-driven SD-WAN solutions also offer zero-touch provisioning, reducing the need for manual configuration and allowing for rapid deployment. IT administrators can quickly and easily deploy changes and security policies with zero-touch provisioning.
Reduces overall attack surface
SD-WAN reduces the overall attack surface by segmenting networks. By creating separate networks with different security policies, organizations can limit the attack surface, preventing attackers from spreading their malicious code to other parts of the network. In addition, micro-segmentation allows businesses to divide their networks into smaller units, limiting unwanted lateral traffic and blocking communication between these units. By segmenting the network, organizations can limit the attack surface even further.
Attack surface refers to the total number of entry points for cyberattacks. The smaller the attack surface, the easier it is to protect. However, security professionals must monitor their attack surfaces and take steps to mitigate vulnerabilities as quickly as possible. This task becomes even more complicated with today's expanding digital footprint and increasing reliance on new technologies. By deploying SD-WAN, organizations can reduce their overall attack surface by 90 percent.
Reduces costs
There are many benefits of implementing an SD-WAN network in an organization. It Most importantly, it is scalable and easy to downsize. A In addition, a company can easily add or delete branches with a simple order from its ISP with an SD-WAN. The additional savings come from the fact that a broadband internet circuit can be procured faster than a carrier-provided MPLS data circuit. The following are just some of the benefits of using an SD-WAN network.
As an additional benefit, SD-WAN reduces IT management costs. The automated functions of the technology reduce the need for highly skilled network engineers to maintain the network. The SD-WAN platform also provides failover capabilities, automatically redirecting traffic to another link in a network failure. This flexibility and agility enable the enterprise to choose the most cost-effective connectivity and minimize operating expenses. It also reduces upfront costs while offering a higher level of service.
Improves bandwidth efficiency
SD-WAN combines high-performance networking and security capabilities. Traditional WAN architectures follow the hub-and-spoke model, where traffic flows to a central hub from remote locations. This traditional method relies on individual VPN connections. As a result, traditional WANs were complex and expensive to manage and provision, limiting an organization's ability to scale on demand. SD-WAN simplifies and streamlines the management of WANs and enables users to enjoy quality networking services at lower costs.
SD-WAN solves WAN performance issues by using policy-based routing to determine the fastest path for data. This enables organizations to avoid backhauling data and prioritize business-critical applications based on usage patterns. Strategic load-balancing can also ensure optimal application performance at lower costs than default MLPS connections. In addition, this allows organizations to optimize bandwidth utilization without compromising security. To maximize bandwidth efficiency, SD-WANs are best paired with SD-WAN infrastructure.
