Business expansion is a goal of many businesses, but it’s not always as straightforward as you might think. Expansion now goes beyond physical assets, processes, and infrastructure, requiring leaders to conceptualise their increased presence within the digital realm. From adding remote networks branches to deploying new resource-hungry applications, scaling a business often means complicated setups and costly network upgrades. Fortunately, this no longer has to be the case.
Enter the Software-Defined Wide Area Networks or SDWAN, an approach to wide area networking that makes business expansion easier and smarter. For opening new sites, integrating cloud services, or onboarding globally dispersed teams, SD-WAN can give your network the flexibility, visibility, and resilience it needs to scale smoothly.
Traditional WANs were built around a centralised architecture where all traffic passed through a local server or a nearby data centre before reaching its destination. This approach is still widely used, but it pre-dates today’s cloud-based technologies, making it more limited. As organisations entrust more of their computing to third-party cloud services and remote applications, the deficiencies of this older approach are becoming clearer.
Even if your traditional WAN works well enough for your current needs, it will inevitably lead to high latency and performance bottlenecks should you expand your network and use more data-hungry apps. Worse still, provisioning a new branch using legacy WANs can take weeks or months, creating frustrating delays and inflated operational costs.
SD-WAN solutions are purpose-built for modern cloud-based business applications, offering centralised control and dynamically directing traffic across the most efficient pathways. This effectively allows your network to do more with fewer resources while also solving longstanding issues with traditional WANs.
SD-WAN empowers your business to:
With SD-WAN, new locations can finally be set-up and onboarded in days instead of weeks. Branch offices can go live with secure connectivity almost immediately. The centralised management and plug-and-play functionality of SD-WAN also removes the need for large local IT support teams at each site, supporting growth while keeping networking costs manageable.
SD-WANs support broadband, LTE, 5G, and all other connectivity options, increasing network resilience and giving users far more choice than was available with traditional WANs. This means businesses can use whichever option is most affordable relative to their needed resource requirements. Over time, this can mean massive savings, especially in multi-site environments where leased lines would otherwise eat into the business’s margins.
Cloud-based apps like Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and video conferencing tools are now essential for modern business. However, these and other modern cloud apps often require extraordinary resources. An SD-WAN can be set up to recognise traffic types and prioritise them accordingly, ensuring anything business-critical gets the bandwidth it needs. This means less latency, a better user experience, and seamless collaboration, wherever the participants may be.
With traditional WANs, growth inevitably leads to complexity, creating vulnerabilities as your network expands. Fortunately, SD-WANs are designed to counter modern threats with integrated firewalls, secure tunnelling, end-to-end encryption, real-time traffic monitoring, and other features that keep unauthorised parties out of your network.
Quite importantly, SD-WAN can also segment traffic across sites, users, and devices, limiting the effects of any successful breach. This not only makes for safer branch expansions; it also allows you to safely move to dispersed and Iot-heavy work environments.
SD-WANs can be managed over a centralised dashboard, avoiding dashboard-hopping and vastly simplifying admin work. This means admins gain close to real-time visibility into traffic patterns, application usage, and device health across all network branches. This isn’t just a win for IT efficiency but it also enables better decision-making, particularly when allocating network resources towards specific business goals.
Today’s business expansions look nothing like they did a decade ago. Even if you’re concentrating on local markets, your network needs to be global and up to today’s challenges.
If you want to grow your business, make sure your network doesn’t just grow larger, but smarter at the same time. SD-WAN technology lets you scale your business without being weighed down by legacy network limitations. With the right solutions, your business will gain the agility, control, and raw performance it needs for effortless expansion, all while keeping costs in check.
The professionals at Network Edge offer years of experience in developing SD-WAN solutions for New Zealand businesses. Give us a call to discover how SD-WAN can streamline your business growth.
