Making the case for SD-WAN: Five ways to get your management on board

According to The World Economic Forum's State of the Connected World 2020 (PDF, 2.5MB) report, there are more connected devices in the world than people.

IDC predicts by 2025 more than 41 billion devices will be connected to the Internet of Things – capturing information on how we live and work, and forming the basis of how we use data-driven technology. While this trend has resulted in IT teams focused on improving end-user application performance, it places greater demand on the network. 

SD-WAN is emerging as a key candidate to negate the impact on capacity these business tools require, with the promise of optimising and automating infrastructure. However SD-WAN is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and getting the most business value is not as simple as incorporating your current WAN provider’s SD-WAN capabilities into your network.

The implementation of SD-WAN is an opportunity to review and optimise your network from end-to-end. It should be considered as part of the broader technology mix if it’s going to deliver on its promise.

Your network is unique, and the sheer range of possible solutions, vendor technologies and combinations of services require a strategy to deliver the promised benefits.

Taking your SD-WAN conversation to the board

To get the most out of your SD-WAN investment, you will need buy-in across the business.  Rather than being a technology-led conversation, the implementation of SD-WAN should be focused on business outcomes such as improving user experience, network availability, and operational efficiencies.

Here are five key features of SD-WAN to make your business leaders sit up and take note.

1.  Deliver a better user experience

SD-WAN provides better application performance by fine-tuning your WAN. You can also prioritise traffic and use bandwidth more efficiently by routing time-sensitive applications over private networks such as MPLS, while SaaS applications can be directed over the Internet to deliver a better experience to your end-users.

2.  Use bandwidth more effectively

SD-WAN enables more effective utilisation of existing bandwidth for specific applications. This reduces the need to provision more links or extra capacity, avoiding over-engineering of the network and lowering costs.

3.  Increase performance and efficiency

If application performance deteriorates because of the network, business productivity is affected. SD-WAN offers greater visibility into your application performance and control over your network routing options, helping to maximise your business performance and efficiency. 

4.  Streamline network management

With more business processes taking place online, the ability to keep applications running is critical. SD-WAN allows you to simplify and streamline network management, by offering access to, and control over, network technologies as a matter of policy – rather than requiring manual configuration. This can significantly reduce the time it takes to provision networks and resolve complex incidents and problems.

5.  Reduce the impact of network downtime.

The downtime of a ‘high priority’ application is estimated to cost businesses more than US$67,000 per hour, and can have a significant financial effect. Historically the two greatest contributors to network downtime have been unknown single points of failure on the underlay and configuration issues driven by human error.

With SD-WAN data traffic is routed to the next-best performing path in the event of an outage, reducing the possibility of network downtime, and further optimising application performance and user experiences.

We’re here to help you start the conversation

At Telstra we help our customers adopt an end-to-end SD-WAN strategy based on boosting performance levels, improving business agility, simplifying network management, ensuring ‘Zero Preventable Downtime’ and increasing security. Working with us means you also benefit from our established relationships with leading global technology providers, and strong support by local channels and partners.

Think you might be ready to discover how SD-WAN can support your enterprise growth? Request a callback to book a no-obligation session with one of our technical experts now.