If you are considering an SD-WAN implementation for your company, there are a few steps you need to take. You will first need to know what is SD-WAN and find an MSP experienced in SD-WAN implementation. Once you’ve identified a suitable MSP, the next step is to determine the benefits of SD-WAN for your company.
Finding An MSP That Has Experience With SD-WAN
If you are considering deploying SD-WAN, you will want to find a managed services provider (MSP) with experience in this technology. MSPs can help you choose the best SD-WAN solution for your business needs, implement it, and maintain it. An MSP can also help you with circuit design and procurement.
An MSP will have the expertise to implement security controls, which are essential to SD-WAN. SD-WAN solutions generally have built-in security features, but an MSP can help you maximize these features. Plus, an MSP can help you streamline contracts and eliminate duplicative costs.
Choosing an SD-WAN solution built on common standards and APIs is essential, as these make integration easier. This can reduce deployment time and cost, allowing MSPs to leverage existing investments. SD-WAN solutions should also have features that support multiple customer use cases, information sharing, and dynamic security. An MSP that has experience with SD-WAN should be able to implement these security measures seamlessly into their environments.
Benefits of SD-WAN
The benefits of SD-WAN implementation extend far beyond just lower costs. This technology allows you to dynamically choose the best route for your traffic, reducing latency and packet loss. It also enables you to expand your network’s capability without spending money upgrading your existing network. You can add remote locations much more quickly with SD-WAN than with traditional hardware-based networking.
As cloud applications become more vital to business operations, SD-WAN is a great way to improve performance. With SD-WAN, employees can access cloud applications at any branch, regardless of location. SD-WAN also prioritizes business-critical applications, so workers can access them whenever necessary.
SD-WAN also provides improved security. The internet is a potentially lucrative target for hackers, and a poorly implemented firewall or VPN setup can make it difficult to protect a network. By separating networks into segregated regions, SD-WAN helps organizations contain the damage of any hack.
Ways To Implement It
There are many ways to implement SD-WAN, which may vary from organization to organization. For instance, some organizations may implement it using a VLAN, which allows them to listen only to traffic that belongs to the same VLAN. Other organizations may configure failover ports to send traffic over an auxiliary WAN in case of a failure. Regardless of your chosen method, setting up firewall policies that allow traffic to flow on those ports is essential.
SD-WANs can help businesses better use their bandwidth. They enable organizations to use public Internet services to offload traffic and reserve private network capacity for business-critical applications. They can also enhance WAN resilience. Because SD-WANs can run across multiple connections, traffic can be balanced during normal conditions. If a single connection is lost, traffic can fail to the next service without disrupting the upper application. Provisioning templates to implement SD-WAN is a good way to streamline the configuration process. It eliminates the need for error-prone manual processes and allows you to reuse configurations. Another benefit of using templates is that they can be reused across multiple branch offices. This streamlines the deployment process and improves productivity.
Before implementing SD-WAN, ensure you have all the resources and skills you need to run the project. This includes your staff, network and IT skills, and the funding you need to run the project. You should also consider how SD-WAN implementation will affect other projects. For example, if it will impact the schedule of other projects, you may need to re-prioritize some of them.
