The simple answer is more than you think! As environment, social, and governance, or ESG reporting becomes a significant agenda item, a growing number of businesses are taking steps to ensure their ESG performance compares favourably to industry peers.
ESG: Environmental
When it comes to sustainability, it’s important for companies to look beyond traditional ways and expand the thinking to encompass IT and communications technologies and practices. This includes upgrading legacy IT and network infrastructure to support sustainability efforts but also to reduce the proliferation of IT equipment.
In terms of reducing the need for physical hardware, this is where SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) comes in. SD-WAN offers an attractive option for increasing bandwidth and optimising network traffic without investing in more hardware. Allowing businesses to connect their various locations and devices securely and efficiently while providing full visibility into what’s happening across the network.
In line with ESG factors, SD-WAN can help businesses reduce their carbon footprint by prioritising network traffic based on application and user needs and make full use of lower-cost and more energy-efficient internet connections for non-critical applications. This move deftly avoids using more expensive and energy-intensive MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) circuits. The use of an SD-WAN can also help businesses to move applications and data to the cloud, reducing the need for on-premises hardware that requires energy and resources to maintain.
When used in tandem with a strategy to migrate applications to the cloud, going paperless, and adopting unified communications technology that improves remote working, SD-WAN ticks a lot of sustainable business criteria.
ESG: Social
Looking at the social aspect of ESG, SD-WAN can help businesses support flexibility by enabling remote work. You can connect new locations immediately without the months-long delays, meaning your people get instant and secure access to corporate resources as soon as it’s switched on. This allows employees to be more productive from more locations, which in turn helps improve work-life balance and positively impact employees’ mental health and well-being.
Importantly, using SD-WAN, companies are better able to ensure their applications and services are available and responsive, regardless of location.
ESG: Governance
When it comes to governance, SD-WAN simplifies configuring network settings to comply with specific regulations and standards, helping meet security compliance obligations. With SD-WAN, built-in security features like encryption, firewalls, and intrusion prevention tools help protect networks and data from cyber threats, mitigating the potential for data breaches.
Sustainable digital transformation
If you’re looking to take charge of ESG reporting and want to create a more sustainable and responsible network that benefits your company, your people, and the planet, take a closer look at how SD-WAN technology can help you get there. Adopting this software approach to managing Wide Area Networks as part of your company’s sustainable digital transformation can give your company a competitive edge.
