How SD-WAN Resolves Remote Working Challenges

SD-WAN technology is best-placed to resolve many of the remote working challenges organisations are facing today. Organisations that transition to SD-WAN will deliver better user experiences, resulting in improved productivity and enhanced services.

The UK has undergone a massive transition in the way people go about their everyday lives. Organisations that have embraced the nine-to-five working culture of the past several decades have found themselves rushing to adopt new ways of working in order to keep their heads above water in what has been a turbulent few months.

All in all, many organisations should be proud of the way they’ve responded to the coronavirus pandemic in – if not a proactive – then at least an effective reactive manner. However, before virtual boardrooms throughout the UK become too self-congratulatory, it’s worth listening to users speak about their remote working challenges.

Although users have successfully transitioned to remote working, the same cannot be said for some of the applications that have transitioned with them. The cloud-based applications that so many rely on to carry out their day-to-day tasks may well have performed just fine in the office, but users’ shaky broadband connections have struggled. Low bandwidths, along with competition from teenagers streaming Netflix and children attending lessons remotely, have caused significant performance issues – especially when cloud-based applications need to run complex routes before they can even get to the user’s laptop.

SD-WAN technology is best-placed to resolve remote working challenges, enabling organisations to deliver better user experiences that improve productivity and enhance the services they deliver. In this blog, we’ll explore how.

Resolve Remote Working Challenges

SD-WAN is capable of forming the backbone of your organisation’s digital transformation strategy. The increasing adoption of cloud-based applications will soon necessitate a more advanced, intelligent networking fabric than MPLS. SD-WAN’s features provide the intelligent functionality that optimises your network and resolves remote working challenges; here are five of the key differentiatiors that are leading organisations to adopt SD-WAN:

• Reduce cloud friction. Increasingly, organisations are moving to cloud-based applications. SD-WAN can prioritise access to cloud-based applications from home and office locations; whereas MPLS needs to back haul data via the data centre, SD-WAN delivers local site breakout regardless of location. This reduces hops, getting you to cloud apps quicker and easier. The outcome? Enhanced performance for your users.
• Prioritise traffic. SD-WAN prioritises traffic on the application layer or through policy management. For example, through application-aware QoS routing and traffic steering you can prioritise and separate apps like Microsoft Teams, or you can route intelligently to avoid circuits that are suffering performance issues where possible. MPLS can’t separate the traffic in this way, meaning it is unable to optimise the performance of cloud-based applications in the same way.
• Security to the edge. SD-WAN delivers secure, encrypted tunnelling. With 6D-WAN’s Active and Advanced offerings, built using next generation firewall technology, Six Degrees can turn on security functionality without deploying more equipment. This makes 6D-WAN a consolidated networking and security solution that can grow with your organisation, enabling you to deliver security to the network edge without needing to deploy more hardware. The outcome is that home workers receive the same level of security as the head office – making the home a branch office extension with the same corporate policy set.
• Increase visibility. SD-WAN delivers live, real-time visibility into sites, devices, connections, packet loss, latency, jitter, and performance issues, enabling you to identify problems and also what traffic is being sent where. This full network insight outperforms MPLS, which simply can’t replicate this amount of information. SD-WAN gives you the information you need to optimise your network at all times, enabling you to perform actions such as traffic separation to improve performance.
• Active-active. If you’re at the office, SD-WAN allows you to use two connections simultaneously. This enables you to use all connections into the business, allowing for true traffic steering and application-aware routing. For users working from home, the 6D-WAN Home Worker solution provides a secondary Six Degrees-managed connection that works together with existing home broadband, enabling you to separate home traffic from day-to-day work traffic.

The UK’s Only Truly Converged SD-WAN Solution

SD-WAN technology is built from the ground up to address many of the remote working challenges organisations are facing today. In this blog, we have provided five reasons why organisations that transition to SD-WAN will deliver better user experiences, resulting in improved productivity and enhanced services.

6D-WAN is the UK’s only truly converged SD-WAN solution. Leveraging Six Degrees’ industry-leading expertise across security, hybrid cloud and network management, 6D-WAN features managed service tiers that can be tailored to your organisation’s unique requirements. Through intelligent design and next generation network capabilities, your 6D-WAN deployment will form the backbone of your organisation’s digital transformation strategy.