The Adoption of SD-WAN: an insight guide for growing businesses

Businesses of all sizes are being challenged to extend their networks to more people, places and things than ever before. The rise of cloud, SaaS, mobile devices and IoT is pushing more traffic over the public internet and creating a greater dependency on high-speed wireless access. Legacy Wide Area Networks (WANs) — predominantly wired, hardware-defined and resource-intensive — increasingly can't keep pace.

What is SD-WAN?

Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) uses software-based virtualisation to create a network overlay, decoupling network services from the underlying hardware WAN circuits. In practice, this means IT and business managers can deploy and manage internet-based connectivity from the cloud — making network changes themselves, instantly, across a whole WAN, without a lengthy conversation with a service provider.

Why legacy WANs are holding businesses back

• Complexity — legacy solutions require expensive specialists to provision, maintain and troubleshoot, delaying new applications by months.
• Visibility & security — as more traffic moves off the private network and over the internet, IT teams struggle to protect what they can't see or control.
• Flexibility — long provisioning cycles and lengthy security reviews slow down growth and new initiatives.
• Cost — provisioning wired connectivity to distributed offices, remote sites or mobile workforces can be expensive, or simply impossible.

What SD-WAN brings to the table

• Rapid deployment — set up bandwidth, firewall and routing policy changes from a simple control panel, without sending an engineer to site.
• Cost savings versus MPLS — sophisticated, secure WAN services at costs closer to entry-level internet connections.
• Application-aware traffic control — define and prioritise traffic across the network without expensive manual weighting.
• A hybrid environment — migrate traffic and connections over time rather than overhauling your existing WAN/MPLS network in one go.
• Bonded connectivity — combine mediums such as fibre, broadband and 4G/5G for resilience, particularly where Ethernet or fibre is difficult or costly to deploy.

Getting started with SD-WAN

SD-WAN doesn't have to mean ripping out your existing network overnight. Our SD-WAN as a Service combines multiple underlying connections — from fibre leased lines through to 4G/5G mobile backup — into a single, application-aware overlay, with AppQoE continuously steering traffic to the best-performing path.