Hybrid WAN or SD-WAN for your hybrid workforce?
Hybrid WANs can reduce enterprise WAN expenses by up to 40% and increase bandwidth at the same time.*
Both are better than traditional WAN for cloud-based businesses
Quick: Where’s your sales manager working today? How about your human resources director? Do you know where your CFO is? You may not know who’s in the office, at headquarters or working from home. But wherever they are today, they could be somewhere else tomorrow. And your network needs to adapt to the ever-changing scenarios of a hybrid workforce.
As your teams access company data from more locations, applications and devices than ever before, managing your wide area network (WAN) gets complicated. Your network resources are extending further into the cloud, home offices and everywhere people connect. It’s no longer cost effective or efficient—or even possible, really—to control and secure a traditional WAN with multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) links in this environment.
Traditional WANs were not built to scale quickly. Their network architecture is difficult to manage and performance suffers when data is routed inefficiently through the system. With the increased network traffic from cloud-based apps, security problems increase too.
So what are your options? Hybrid WAN and SD-WAN meet many of the dynamic demands of a dispersed, bandwidth-heavy, cloud-based business. Hybrid WAN provides cost savings and resiliency. SD-WAN adds intelligence that uses your WAN links more efficiently and effectively. Here, we take a look at both.
What is hybrid WAN?
A hybrid WAN connects two different company WANs and usually different technologies—MPLS, wireless, broadband—and sends traffic across each, depending on the policies and priorities you set.
Though a hybrid WAN is a single network, each circuit offers unique pros and cons. You can count on the inherent security and service level agreement (SLA) performance guarantees of MPLS—along with its costly bandwidth and deployments. At the same time, your internet circuits provide low-cost connectivity and quick, easy provisioning. When combined into a hybrid WAN model, they deliver significant benefits over a traditional WAN.
What are the benefits of hybrid WAN?
Here’s what hybrid WAN offers, from an IT perspective:
- Don’t let failure get you down. Hybrid WAN consists of two or more circuits, so if one goes down, it redirects traffic to another, ensuring business continues to operate.
- Spend less on bandwidth. With hybrid WAN, you can buy and use lower-cost broadband alongside MPLS to save on bandwidth.
- Add capacity with ease. You can quickly and easily add capacity to your hybrid WAN by inserting internet connections next to your MPLS links.
Hybrid WAN elevator speech: Hybrid WAN consists of two separate WAN circuits that carry traffic between branches and data centers. If one circuit fails or is congested and slow, traffic is routed to the other circuit. As your business becomes increasingly cloud-based, hybrid WAN maximizes your current technology while lowering your overall WAN costs.
What is SD-WAN?
SD-WAN sits on top of your WAN infrastructure. It uses software-defined technology to manage traffic from a central location, creating a unified network that connects to the cloud and extends to remote users and locations. Think of it as an all-powerful, always-on mission control, giving you full visibility over your entire network and all your applications remotely, from a single portal.
What are the benefits of SD-WAN?
From an IT leader’s perspective, now is the time to consider an SD-WAN solution. Why? Because it answers the bandwidth and security demands of an increasingly mobile, cloud-based world. While also lowering costs, simplifying cloud migration and streamlining network operations.
- Ready your WAN for anything. SD-WAN can connect traditional hardware and remote computers through any WAN circuit, thanks to a unified network policy. Centralized control of your WAN and applications allows you to move quickly and easily, keeping your business poised for continued growth.
- Cut the complexity of network management. If you opt for a Managed SD-WAN solution, you can consolidate vendors down to one dedicated partner for your entire network.
- Maximize your current investment. With SD-WAN as your network overlay, you have flexible options for your underlay, including broadband, MPLS, fiber, LTE and ethernet links. SD-WAN integrates seamlessly with your legacy technologies, so you can migrate in phases without a large capital spend or downtime. You can even maintain your existing MPLS-based WAN structure and use SD-WAN to manage it more efficiently.
- Pre-determine, control and monitor traffic in real time. SD-WAN allows you to create policies that determine which applications get priority, and automatically directs them to the best connections. Think, the POS system in retail or the EMR system in healthcare. You can also monitor and adjust traffic in real time, changing QoS and prioritization as needed to avoid issues and improve experiences.
- Extend security to every endpoint. SD-WAN extends your internal network to your mobile workforce, giving you end-to-end security—and peace of mind knowing people aren’t logging into your VPN from unsecured connections. You can even segment simultaneously running traffic to ensure specific groups—like customers, employees and vendors—have access to only specific information, protecting your sensitive data.
- Lower your EXes: CAPEX and OPEX. Without all the equipment of traditional WAN, the cost of SD-WAN entry is minimal. You save even more capital costs when you use SD-WAN for secure access with low-cost broadband links instead of more expensive MPLS. And when you use SD-WAN to automate network maintenance, you save on operational costs, too. Throw in Managed SD-WAN and you get flexible payment options to maximize your cash flow.
- Connect people to better experiences. Especially compared to traditional WAN, SD-WAN provides smooth, easy online connection and collaboration. There are fewer slowdowns and less lag because your traffic automatically follows the strongest path.
SD-WAN elevator speech: Wherever you are in your cloud migration, you’ve experienced the limitations of traditional WAN. Now that work from anywhere is here to stay, and the need for flexible, cloud-ready networking is escalating, traditional WAN is only going to get more frustrating—and risky to security, productivity and business growth. Which makes a near-irresistible case for SD-WAN.
Frontier as your partner for choice, partner for change. Not all SD-WANs are the same. The success of yours depends in part on your provider’s solution. You’ll want to look for functionalities like multi-path selection, interface choice, performance and infrastructure deployment flexibility—and decide whether you want to go it alone or collaborate with a dedicated managed services partner like Frontier to guide your journey.
