During the onset of the pandemic last year, the adoption of cloud technologies gathered pace as more and more businesses opted for a cloud-first technology strategy. This in turn has fuelled new demand for SD-WAN services.
Operating during times of unprecedented disruption and uncertainty, the business value of cloud technologies to scale up and down quickly had never been clearer. Likewise, access to cloud-based applications from anywhere on any device had never played a more important part in enabling business continuity.
According to IDC’s FutureScape predictions, by the end of this year, “80% of enterprises will put a mechanism in place to shift to cloud-centric infrastructure and applications twice as fast as before the pandemic. CIOs must accelerate the transition to a cloud-centric IT model to maintain competitive parity and to make the organisation more digitally resilient.”
It’s no surprise then that in companies across the country, IT teams are continuing to move applications to secure and easily accessible cloud locations to mitigate security, access, and bandwidth challenges while realising cost efficiencies.
SD-WAN v MPLS
As your business ramps up its adoption of cloud services which place more demands on agile, secure network connections, it’s critical that your WAN can deliver performance. But with applications now residing in multiple locations such as various public or private clouds, subscription-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, and on-premise data centres, using the traditional WAN with a router-centric model no longer makes sense: Backhauling traffic from branch offices to headquarters to the internet and back again adds latency which impairs application performance. And this results in a poor user experience and frustration for your employees.
SD-WAN shifts how a WAN is deployed and managed
Mitigating these issues and in support of cloud-first businesses, software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) presents a strong alternative to traditional network topography. As its name suggests, SD-WAN is a software approach to managing wide-area networks. It offers improved network security and agility, with simplification, lower costs, and bandwidth efficiency to support fast and reliable business applications in the cloud.
Leveraging a variety of technologies that offer business-class traffic service independent of the underlying transport, SD-WAN serves to link all data and locations together by using available internet services, replacing expensive Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) with internet connectivity using NBN. Regulating how and where your data gets transferred, rather than using the same connection for every process, it prioritises certain traffic and signals, routing traffic to the best and most affordable channel. This leads to fewer lost connections, faster transfers, and reduced connection costs.
In addition, through consolidating and simplifying network architecture you minimise the need to distribute your highly skilled network resources to manage multiple devices stacked in the branch office.
Outsourcing SD-WAN services
If you’re facing increased network management costs and sub-optimal network performance and security, contact imei about modernising your network infrastructure for a cloud-first future with our managed SD-WAN services.
imei’s managed SD-WAN services gives you both networking and security capabilities in a single package, improving security and performance while making life easier for your IT team.
With our managed SD-WAN services, we handle the hardware, software, networking, and transport services required, and take care of maintenance and management requirements, liberating your IT team from these tasks.
Modernise your networking strategy
Find out more about moving to an SD-WAN environment with imei’s trusted managed services. We can support you with the technology and expertise to assess your network needs and implement a cost-effective solution
