How to Determine Whether SD-WAN is Right for Your Business

SD-WAN adoption continues to grow at a fast clip with the latest reports estimating that this market will grow by 90% in the next 5 years, according to IDC. This isn’t surprising, there is a myriad of benefits that SD-WAN can bring to your business, including increased resilience, improved performance and lower WAN transport costs. Regardless of the hype surrounding this technology you will still need to determine whether SD-WAN is right for your business.

Before we start, we must point out that not all SD-WANs are created equal, as you know it is important to choose your provider wisely. At Solar we partner with Silver Peak, the leader in building SD-WAN & hybrid WAN solutions. Silver Peak offers a complete, high-performance solution for true virtualisation that surpasses SD-WAN table stakes and delivers higher levels of application performance, business productivity and user experience. Silver Peak is also recognised as a global leader in terms of WAN Optimisation in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and is also positioned the furthest on the Completeness of vision axis, as you can see on the image below:

So, how do you really know if SD-WAN is right for your business?

If you have already established that SD-WAN is the right fit for you but you still have additional questions, see here the top questions everyone asks about SD-WAN and their answers.

SD-WAN is right for your business if it’s geographically dispersed

SD-WAN is particularly relevant for highly-distributed organisations especially if those sites are situated across various locations and/or countries. There isn’t a minimum number of sites required in order to adopt and benefit from SD-WAN, but equally the technology can be more valuable to organisations with more than 10 sites. The more sites your organisation has, the greater the benefits and cost-savings of an SD-WAN adoption will be (more on savings in the section below).

SD-WAN is right for you if you are interested in reducing your dependency on MPLS

The savings with SD-WAN can be substantial. By reducing a company’s dependency on MPLS, SD-WAN lowers costs by relying less on expensive private links and using inexpensive public connections instead. MPLS is typically priced anywhere between £30 and £60 per megabit per month, whereas broadband costs as little as £2 per megabit per month. So if your business has 100 locations across the country, the savings can be substantial.

SD-WAN is right for you if you want to improve application performance

Historically, businesses needed to only be concerned with the performance of the applications hosted on their private networks and centralised data centres. MPLS has been able to meet the above requirements for decades. However, now that many applications (Office 365, Salesforce, Dropbox, Cisco Webex etc.) have moved away from private data centres to the cloud and rely on the Internet to carry them to branches, we can clearly see the limitations of MPLS.

That’s where SD-WAN steps in as it can provide network-wide performance regardless of where the applications are hosted. Silver Peak’s Unity solution is not affected by the Internet ‘weather’ conditions that may disrupt the performance of applications. It ensures consistent and responsive performance from any location, eliminating latency and packet loss.

SD-WAN is right for you if network agility is important to your business

Network agility focuses on keeping a system stable, flexible, and usable. It is the ability of network software and hardware to automatically control and configure itself and other network assets across any number of devices on a network.

Network agility is critical since today’s fast-paced business environment requires networks to be able to readily adapt and accommodate changing traffic patterns, add new services quickly, together with other day-to-day changes. That’s why organisations are deploying SD-WAN to increase their network agility, as it enables companies to spin connections up and down, dynamically adjust network paths and quickly add bandwidth.

We hope this article has been of interest. If you are still unsure whether SD-WAN is for you, please contact our team and we will be happy to help.

Why Wavenet?

Wavenet’s SD-WAN solutions augment and replace MPLS networks with secure broadband Internet connectivity, dramatically reducing WAN costs and complexity.

Benefit from unprecedented levels of visibility, control and security, whilst improving application and network performance.

At Wavenet, we futureproof technology. Protecting your business for today and tomorrow. Our SD-WAN solutions do just that, making your business brilliant.