How to Cut Costs With SD-WAN

The cost of running a business increases year by year. This article will review how to cut costs with SD-WAN.

Summary

Organizations are constantly looking for ways to improve operational performance, increase reliability, implement heightened security, and realize cost savings for their business operations. The same is true when it comes to a company’s networking and IT systems. Increasingly, companies are switching to software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WANs) instead of traditional wide-area networks (WANs). However, companies might hesitate to implement software-defined WAN technology because of concerns that the pricing might outweigh its benefits.

While employing software-defined WAN technology does come with a required cost outlay, this type of technology can significantly reduce a company’s short and long-term network costs without having to be locked into a single provider. It also improves network security and performance while reducing the organization’s overall operating costs.

Benefits of Software-Defined WAN Technology

Many public and private entities consider software-defined WAN technology as a way to eliminate their dependence on expensive and slow MPLS technology. While this is a benefit of switching to this technology, it is only one of several benefits that SD-WAN offers to organizations.

Software-defined WAN technology allows companies to quickly and easily add new lines as capacity needs increase at branch offices. This technology directly connects remote sites to the internet, helping to avoid delays and bottlenecks that traditional WAN users are accustomed to dealing with.

Unlike traditional WAN environments that have single links for each location, SD-WAN allows you to use multiple links from different internet service providers (ISPs). This helps to prevent a single failure point from taking the entire network down.

SD-WAN is much more agile than traditional WANs when your organization is opening up new branches or remote offices. You can set up secure, reliable networks quickly at each new site and use the ISP that is most appropriate to the areas where each site is located.

Finally, with software-defined WAN technology, you can optimize how your organization uses resources by assigning key apps to different links, including internet connections and internal lines. You can also assign different guarantees for quality of service (QoS) to each line so that the right resources can be applied in different situations to maximize productivity and performance while minimizing your software-defined WAN costs.

Cost Savings Realized With Software-Defined Wide Area Networks

Software-defined wide area network technology can be a cost-effective internet connectivity solution for organizations. Here are some ways that your organization might save money by implementing software-defined WAN.

Lower Provisioning Costs

Provisioning of the servers, network components, hardware, edge devices, and storage components for traditional WANs costs can be higher and is more labor-intensive. With a SD-WAN, the service can be installed as an overlay on top of your existing routers and other network infrastructure and won’t require the installation of expensive servers and hardware at new locations. The software routes traffic in the best way to remote sites and has much greater efficiency than routing with traditional WANs. You won’t need to have the same types of connections at all sites and can instead customize your connection types based on the needs of individual sites.

Reduced Connectivity Costs

SD-WAN systems can reduce your company’s ongoing network operating expenses by changing from costly MPLS lines to broadband connections, including cable, fiber, DSL, and mobile technology. Commodity broadband is significantly cheaper than MPLS lines.

Savings Through Optimization

A main feature of a software-defined wide area network solution is the support it offers for multiple connection types, including dedicated links, MPLS, ADSL links, internet, and 4G. Workloads can be shared, and the service also offers support for the automatic provisioning of premium services, including WAN optimization, firewalls, virtual private networks (VPNs), and application delivery controls. This can help your company save money through the optimization of your networking.

Savings Through Increased Productivity

With the enhanced network performance offered by SD-WAN technology, traffic can be automatically and dynamically sent along the most appropriate path based on the circuit costs, security conditions, and requirements for service quality. This can improve the latency of the delivery of packets to reach their destinations faster. Your managed services provider can work with your network administrator to define the routing policies and optimize your company’s data and network management processes. In turn, the increased performance of your applications can also increase the productivity of your staff, helping your company to realize greater profits while reducing your expenses.

Reduced Operating Costs

Since SD-WAN is much more flexible and versatile than traditional WAN, it helps to simplify operations through cloud-based central provisioning, policy control, application visibility, and management. The resulting network is more resilient and robust because it helps you to leverage the most cost-effective WAN connections to improve the performance of your network. The network capabilities will also be scalable without sacrificing connections or spending more for added bandwidth, and the management of your infrastructure will be greatly simplified.

Lower Support Costs

IT services for software-defined WANs involve less technical support needs and costs. Since the processing, transmission, and storage capacities of software-defined WANs are significantly greater, you can expect a reduced call volume in relation to the volume of your data. The cloud-based structure also helps to optimize the logistics involved with maintenance since everything can be completed remotely online.

SD-WAN Cost Savings Through Enhanced Security

Software-defined wide area networks offer enhanced security through the implementation of secure access service edge (SASE) to deliver cybersecurity solutions in real-time from the cloud, including sandboxing, threat prevention, next-generation firewalls, and more. Enhanced security can help to prevent intrusions, downtime, and resulting losses.

Cost Savings Through Maximal Utilization of Available Connections

With software-defined WAN solutions, WAN network congestion and workloads can be balanced and managed more effectively for improved application performance and lower routing costs. When an MPLS connection is congested, traffic from voice-over-IP (VoIP) can be diverted to a broadband circuit to better use the resources and ensure the latency of packets. WAN links are measured in real-time as the software-defined WAN technology adapts to address any shortcomings of the network.

Long-Term Return on Investment

Over time, your software-defined WAN solution will be cost-effective by increasing the reliability of mobile connections, WAN services, and the Internet while reducing your total cost of ownership. Managing wide-area networks has traditionally been inflexible and expensive in corporate network operations, but SD-WAN simplifies these processes. They can be modified and adjusted remotely to meet the needs of different environments.

An SD-WAN service might be a more cost-effective choice for your organization over the long term. If you would like to learn more about the cost savings and digital transformation your company might realize from an SD-WAN deployment, contact us at Meriplex today.