The Enterprise’s Guide to WAN Transformation
To ensure productivity and scalability, your enterprise relies on remote work, mobility, and multi-cloud networks. This also means that as your business expands, so too does your attack surface, and traditional security strategies simply can’t keep up with the challenge. This is exactly why many enterprises are turning to SD-WAN to address underlying challenges and tightly integrate security.
We know that SD-WAN delivers the security you need for today’s threat landscape. But what is its purpose and power in achieving other specific business outcomes, like user experience, speed and bandwidth, and cost savings? In this post, we dive into the potential of SD-WAN and why it’s increasingly preferable to other approaches, like MPLS. Consider this your primer for total WAN transformation!
What is SD-WAN?
As a primer, let’s start with a clear definition: SD-WAN is a software-defined approach to managing the WAN (wide area network). It enables fast and secure connections between your numerous data centres and cloud services; essentially, it allows your organisation to reshape and secure its entire enterprise.
Another helpful way to think about SD-WAN is to begin with some of the challenges you may be experiencing right now. For example: Is your legacy WAN architecture complicating your digital innovation initiatives? Is your security posture sufficiently strong across your various locations? SD-WAN is a proven approach to boost your proprietary backhaul connectivity services, improve your network performance, deliver robust and consistent security postures, and streamline your policy management. It ushers in low-risk adoption of cloud-based applications and ensures the success of all your digital transformation initiatives
Why do you need SD-WAN?
When we talk about SD-WAN, we typically talk about its many security benefits. The right solution enables private, secure, and direct internet access and ensures consistent security across all edges.
Yet, there are other reasons to make the move to SD-WAN. The right solution will deliver more efficient operations and a streamlined cloud environment. SD-WAN simplifies your overall network, improves your bandwidth, and boosts application performance—and it does all this without sacrificing security and data policy. When it comes to your internal and external customers, SD-WAN overcomes all-too-familiar packet loss, jitter, and latency issues to deliver the highest-quality user experience. Lastly, you’ll gain instant ROI with the right solution. SD-WAN significantly reduces bandwidth costs, which leads to lower total cost of ownership (TCO). It also reduces capital costs through network point consolidation and improved control and performance of all security products at your edge.
Benefits of SD-WAN Over MPLS
Let’s start with performance. Many enterprises continue to use MPLS, a legacy routing method. While it can provide a reliable, fixed level of bandwidth, it struggles to meet today’s unpredictable traffic requirements. Often, a business needs to lease an MPLS connection for worst-case load scenarios. SD-WAN, on the other hand, automatically recognises your applications and adapts bandwidth in tandem—leaving you with faster steering and more consistent, peak performance.
Protection is another critical consideration. MPLS provides secured, managed links between your data centre and branches, but it lacks analysis of the data it delivers through your service provider’s internal backbone. The right SD-WAN solution, however, comes with built-in dynamic meshed VPN capabilities for all data in transit, as well as deep traffic inspection using IPS, firewall, web filtering, anti-malware, anti-virus, and more.
Lastly, SD-WAN beats MPLS on cost. Legacy routing methods are usually expensive to build and maintain. SD-WAN reduces your overall costs through optimised, multi-point connectivity over a distributed, private data exchange and control points. As a result, you’ll reduce your TCO at the same time you’re boosting performance and improving your security.
Optec Partners with Fortinet and You
The capabilities of SD-WAN and its benefits over MPLS are clear. However, keep in mind that not all SD-WAN solutions are created equal. At Optec, we’re pleased to offer a best-in-class, secure SD-WAN solution with built-in security and high-speed networking capabilities. We’re a Fortinet MSSP Expert partner and SD-WAN specialist, a testament to our experience and knowledge of Fortinet's Secure SD-WAN solution (which was named a leader in the 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™). It’s one of the best solutions out there, and Optec is your trusted ally to deliver it across your enterprise.
Take the first step to WAN transformation today: Book a free Secure SD-WAN assessment to see how much you and your network stand to gain.
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