Are you considering a move from MPLS to SD-WAN? Many companies have seen in making the switch, with SD-WAN services delivering a host of capabilities that are increasingly important for businesses moving through their digital transformation journeys.
Whether you want to enhance application performance, reduce the time to add new sites, or give your organization a way to avoid network downtime and bottlenecks, SD-WAN enables you to create a more agile and resilient network.
If you still haven’t migrated to an SD-WAN solution, consider these five key benefits your company can gain by making the move.
You need to know how well your services are performing but developing that awareness can be difficult if you’re using MPLS. Delivering deep, actionable insight isn’t a strong suit of most MPLS architectures and the resulting knowledge gap leaves IT teams struggling to optimize their environments. Businesses that utilize SD-WAN gain a tremendous advantage by having access to a portal that provides performance metrics for each location. You can check out jitter, latency – and see it all in one view. You’ll finally have the visibility you need to ensure everything is working at optimal capacity.
Because SD-WAN has the ability to deliver and sustain a much more robust quality of service, enterprises enjoy faster application performance than is typically possible with MPLS. In an SD-WAN environment, apps are automatically directed over the link with the best performance at the time the application is being accessed. The result is a better user experience – whether that means employees, customers, or both – and higher productivity. Slow links caused by periodic usage spikes or other issues can’t even slow you down, since traffic is managed dynamically by your SD-WAN devices.
The time needed to spin up new locations has been a chronic source of irritation for businesses on MPLS. Any IT department that’s been last on the list to find out the organization plans to add a new office can relate to the frustration caused by the long lead-times that underpin traditional MPLS services. SD-WAN eliminates those lags, enabling you to grab a new broadband connection in days, rather than ordering 100 Mbps Ethernet circuits that might take months to install. Speed of deployment is also an increasingly important benefit as companies transition much of their workforces to remote locations. The ongoing disruption caused by the pandemic response and recovery may spur some enterprises to adjust their physical office requirements. With SD-WAN, your organization has the agility to more easily transition to the structure that best suits your needs.
Not only is adding new locations exponentially faster with SD-WAN, it’s also less cumbersome. Immediately upon deployment, the SD-WAN box communicates with the main controller and the presence of your new location is automatically broadcast to the entire network. Routing tables are also configured by the SD-WAN device, no longer requiring your team to input the information individually. IT staff don’t need to spend time programming or waiting for the information to propagate across the rest of the infrastructure – it’s all taken care of at the hub site with network control. Along with being fast it’s also simple and, because the system automatically handles these previously manual tasks, there’s less chance for data entry errors or oversights.
Redundancy and resilience have proven more important than ever as IT navigates the changes from COVID-19 and the resulting impacts on organizations. The shift to SD-WAN can help improve your business continuity strategy by enabling several means of access through each SD-WAN device. If one link fails – either because of a local issue or because the regional provider is experiencing an outage or resource spike – the device will automatically transition to the remaining links. In addition, you’re able to utilize multiple links simultaneously to ensure the best performance and most stable service. And because SD-WAN manages failovers seamlessly, your users will never know anything happened.
Moving to SD-WAN can help your business develop a more efficient network, insulate you from some of the challenges of MPLS, and position you to leverage more powerful technologies. If you’d like more information, Carousel’s experts are ready to help you find the right SD-WAN solution for your unique needs.
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