New Challenges of WAN Connectivity: Improving the user experience
As IT administrators, we are faced every day with new challenges and realities; service applications, infrastructure in the Cloud, optimization of resources, improvement in the user experience, data assurance, shorter and flexible marketing times for a global level, are some of them. If these are a good part of your list of daily tasks or the goals you have for this year, we have good news, we can start to give an answer to each of these points for the network that transports the data of your organization, office to office / cloud / data center / user, with a simple, scalable and secure solution: SDWAN.
The moment to reach the concepts of the networks defined by software and technology is now. A solution can start supporting your company when you have the task of keeping all the offices connected, working and with the best possible experience.
One question that can come to our minds about this solution is how much will it cost me? However, the question that SDWAN really answers is: will all this save me? From the simple fact of being able to modify my WAN links to have hybrid scenarios where I can now replace MPLS over Internet, it will allow you to perceive the savings from the same day that the intelligent network starts to work. This is not to mention the fact that enabling a new office in the WAN part will go from days to minutes, since its centralized policies and a self-provisioning system will only need to turn on the computer and connect the links, the rest will no longer be a concern.
In what we are going, we have touched on two points that will undoubtedly give meaning to this solution for those who are not in IT: time and money. The ability to reduce deployment times, migration times, change of link providers, new applications, among others, will undoubtedly improve the way our organization operates; and stop relying on expensive links to move to more accessible combinations of links, will make the solution generate savings from the first day of operation.
The best thing about this solution is that there are many more benefits that make it an excellent option. Until a while ago we could only have traffic control over what was inside the organization, however, that is not the reality we have. Today all our companies use and need a series of applications that reside in a variety of places: Public Clouds, service providers, our own data center, in the data centers of those who offer us applications that are in the Cloud. More and more applications and services, including internal developments, reside outside our domain, and today SDWAN can finally give us an answer to two important points when we talk about these solutions: experience and security.
How can we improve the experience of our users when accessing these services and applications that are in such different places? SDWAN solves it easily, sending the traffic of each application at the right time in the most optimal way for it,independent if the other end is in an office, your data center, or the Cloud. This is the best possible decision to improve the experience of our users. It even allows us, in the case of using hybrid connections where I have an Internet link in my remote headquarters, to send traffic directly over the Internet without consuming my MPLS link or my Internet link from the main office.
This is where a new doubt comes in and what about Cybersecurity? Nothing to worry about. SDWAN, being an integral solution and centralized management will allow us to define policies that adjust to what our company requires, and if a change has to be made in those policies in the 100 sites that I have already implemented, it will automatically be replicated in all of them. From the security point of view, the solution will not only encrypt all the traffic that is running through this network, but will be able to offer controls on user navigation, ensuring the new security perimeter: the end user.
Other questions that will come at this point where everything looks very good for those of us who work in IT are, and how am I going to manage all this? How much time is going to take me? It is from a single, centralized console, from where not only will be responsible for the policies that will give the guidelines on how the WAN network should work, but also will monitor those links, check if the SLAs are being met, which will warn the trend of consumption of my links and recommend actions such as bandwidth growth for a particular location, will allow to see how the new application that we have just acquired and that above all will save time by automating much of the tasks that had been done manually. Whether you are looking to update your links or your bandwidth, thinking about changing providers or making a mix of several, or looking for a way to reduce the costs of these means of transport. And if we consider that it can be accompanied by all the advantages we have had here in terms of security, visibility, experience, flexibility and management: definitely, the moment is now.