Benefits of SD-WAN for Small Businesses

Many small businesses are migrating to cloud-based applications for real-time business application usage in the office, the storefront and also online. The numerous benefits of SD-WAN for small businesses such as increased bandwidth, lower latency, and aggregated link usage can quickly enhance existing WAN services.

Changing times have led to a sudden increase in virtual collaboration using tools like WebEx, Zoom, and Office 365. Thus, small businesses are expanding their use of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud services, where users are accessing large files and other applications that require additional bandwidth. 

They are doing so while maintaining their internet connection through local internet service providers, which often doesn’t have the WAN bandwidth to support these robust applications. As a result, IT departments are challenged to address these rapidly increasing demands within the company’s existing WAN.

The Securus Secure SD-WAN platform enables small businesses to support application growth, keep their networks agile, and simplify the implementation of and optimisation for cloud services.

SD-WAN General Overview

What does SD-WAN mean for the small business? SD-WAN is a virtual WAN technology that allows even small companies to combine multiple Internet and/or MPLS lines to increase the performance of voice, video, and cloud-based applications across single or multiple sites.

Even companies with a smaller workforce often have employees in multiple locations. For them, SD-WAN provides numerous additional benefits such as increased centralised control, network agility, WAN performance, and overall network scalability, all while reducing cost.

Can Small Businesses Benefit from SD-WAN?

Yes. Whether yours is a small family-owned business or expanding with several offices and multiple locations, migrating your company’s network to an SD-WAN model has several advantages. These are mostly surrounding the use of cloud-based applications plus hosted voice and video services.

Cloud-based services and other emerging technologies are available to organisations of all sizes, allowing small and large businesses alike to achieve greater efficiency and productivity levels.

These cloud-based applications provide remote access to business data and analytics that are centrally stored and continuously updated. Both your team and your customers can have access to products, services, and account information based on the most current, accurate data. SD-WAN can help ensure these applications run as they should.

The Future of SD-WAN for the Small Business Owner

The goal of any small business is to grow whilst remaining profitable. For some, that means a more extensive local customer base. For others, it means expanding to serve customers in multiple locations locally as well as globally. If your business is expanding, chances are your staff relies on the Internet to connect to essential applications and databases. 

If you are still relying on your local internet provider, low performing WAN services combined with bandwidth contention, poor SLA’s and other service area related issues can be a challenge.

This is where the Securus Secure SD-WAN platform offers a solution for the small business owner. Because SD-WAN can route traffic easily over multiple connection types, including broadband, it’s a cost-effective solution for small to mid-sized businesses that rely on cloud-based services. 

If your company has more than one branch office or multiple store locations, implementing an SD-WAN solution can save money while increasing your network performance at the same time.

10 Benefits of SD-WAN for Small Business

SD-WAN’s role is to seamlessly connect your the data, applications, customers, and your workforce, all together. Below are ten benefits of SD-WAN for small businesses.

1. Cost Saving

As small businesses embrace cloud-based applications, both their bandwidth requirements and operating costs increase. With SD-WAN, small businesses can decrease those costs whilst leveraging multiple low-cost local Internet lines.

Cost-saving can also come from switching to SD-WAN from fully private Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) connectivity. When using Internet connectivity (or a combination of Internet and Private WAN), SD-WAN reduces the company’s reliance on those expensive lines.

2. Efficiency of Data Flow

The rapid growth of cloud and hybrid cloud deployments have transformed data management across all industries, including small and family-owned businesses. 

SD-WAN plays a critical role in giving IT administrators the flexibility to deploy and manage data flow. Bandwidth intensive applications can use a different WAN link than time-sensitive services such as voice and video. QOS (Quality Of Service) can also be implemented to segregate and protect vital applications traversing the same link.

3. Resilience

SD-WAN’s resiliency comes from its ability to run WAN services simultaneously over multiple Internet or MPLS links. This model reduces potential network downtime as WAN outages are detected in real-time and automatically switched over to working links.

This resilience allows the SD-WAN platform to adjust to fluctuating traffic flows based, so WAN usage remains at peak efficiency, with resiliency that far surpasses traditional WAN networks.

4. Flexibility

The resiliency discussed above leads to the next benefit of switching to SD-WAN, which offers greater flexibility over networking technologies. Using a centralised portal, administrators have more operational control and clear visibility of SD-WAN network performance. With these features, admins can make additions, moves, and other changes both quickly and instantly. 

5 Scalability

As your small business grows, your network must keep up. Sometimes, business owners need new locations online within days. SD-WAN can work over an existing network infrastructure, enabling you to get new offices or storefronts up and running quickly.

SD-WAN has zero-touch configuration, meaning you can configure and deploy a new branch site from a remote offsite location in a matter of minutes.

6. Simplicity

SD-WAN simplifies the management and deployment of networking services for small businesses, all the while maintaining flexibility and keeping costs lower. While your branches may vary in size and complexity, managing them remains simplified, all from a central portal.

Even though SD-WAN operates with multiple aggregated network links, including wireless, Internet, and MPLS technologies, you can control all from a single location. The benefits that come along with this include automatic fail-over and dynamic path selection.

7. Ease of Provisioning

SD-WAN enables you to provision new sites quickly and set them up with ease. This is possible because of SD-WAN’s centralised management and configuration templates, which ensure right-first-time provisioning.

Using such templates reduces the time needed to install secure communication services. With SD-WAN, you can create secure connections in minutes rather than days. Your employees can establish services from messaging to video collaboration and file sharing almost instantly at a new site. 

8. Enhanced Security Features

SD-WAN’s robust network architecture deploys a secure overlay to a provider-independent infrastructure. In short, SD-WAN accommodates any business’s need to secure clients’ private information and adhere to proper compliance and control regulations as it traversed the WAN.

It applies network-wide security policies and cloud security services wherever needed and extends the WAN perimeter from the cloud to the local branch. Finally, standard IPsec encryption provides end-to-end security from branches to data centres and beyond.

9. Reduced WAN Complexity

As technology evolves, it adds layer after layer of complexity that can swiftly over-complicate a traditional WAN. Eventually, you end up with an overly complicated and slow network. IT contractors need to continually apply patches, updates, and other workarounds to keep things running as they should.

SD-WAN handles multiple, complex systems and applications while seamlessly lowering overall WAN complexity by automating configuration tasks and managing network traffic through a centralised controller.

10. Centralised Management

SD-WAN’s management features are entirely centralised and straightforward to use. Your IT team can create templates that allow you to replicate routing policies and other configuration throughout your company’s entire network, at each location, including home offices for remote employees. Aside from making setup a smooth process, you can apply changes and updates across the entire network at once. 

In addition to updates, SD-WANs simplify network automation through web-based consoles, which helps IT administrators detect network changes and execute new configurations or modifications. Through these same consoles, admins can also configure and deploy hybrid WAN links when needed, no matter what type of connectivity the system uses.

Conclusion

The benefits of SD-WAN for small businesses are clear. Any SMB that still relies on legacy WAN design should transition to SD-WAN’s secure, dynamic, cloud-based infrastructure. The transition promises to enhance performance, fortify security, and increase agility while lowering operating costs.

SD-WAN adapts to cloud applications seamlessly. It offers businesses of all sizes consistently higher performance, visibility, and centralised control over the entire network using zero-touch deployment and single-console control centres. Finally, SD-WAN is scalable and enables your network to expand along with your growing business. You, your employees, and your IT administrators all benefit from these dynamic and cost-effective features.

Please get in touch to discuss your networking requirements in more detail. We offer a completely free consultation with one of our technology experts to fully go over your precise needs.

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