With continuous advancements in technology, more businesses and corporations are opting for cloud-based technology and services to tap into a continually updated system infrastructure. While cloud-based technology has clear advantages, it is only as strong as the underlying network infrastructure. If a businesses’ network isn’t optimized to support cloud technology, network performance can take a hit and be a drain on employee productivity. Businesses need to understand the health and performance of their network to ensure operations are not negatively impacted.
How Network Performance Impacts Business Performance
The performance of your network is crucial to maintaining service levels for your customers and clients, sustaining productivity levels for employees, and managing your bottom line. Network performance issues can quickly prevent workers from communicating with each other and performing crucial tasks, critically hampering your organization. With poor network performance, businesses could experience latency, loss in productivity, network congestion, and configuration issues.
Understanding the Difference Between WAN vs. SD-WAN
In traditional networks, the WAN or wide-area network has been responsible for connecting computers and devices and delivering data over large distances. However, the traditional WAN was not built for applications, data traffic, and security measures caused by increasing cloud adoption. With this shift, organizations are struggling to balance user experience, application performance, and security.
To address these challenges, software-defined wide-area networks or SD-WAN leverages software-defined principles to manage and optimize the reliability and performance of the wide-area network.
Optimize Your Network Performance with SD-WAN
As a virtualized service, SD-WAN can manage the performance of existing WAN connections, extending management to wireless, 5G, VPNs, and SaaS applications. With SD-WAN, Network Administrators can prioritize data traffic, optimize application performance, automate business policies, and provide enhanced security seamlessly across the enterprise.
The following are several ways SD-WAN can improve network performance to deliver business benefits:
Improved Productivity
With the SD-WAN architecture, organizations can modify network connectivity more easily and quickly. With zero-touch deployment and provisioning, on-boarding new devices and software will mean fewer configuration changes. Providing users with new software or deploying new revenue-generating services will now take hours or days vs. weeks or months.
Improved Security and Adherence to Important Policies
Given the continuous increase and sophistication of cyber-attacks, SD-WAN provides multiple levels of security, such as dynamic segmentation and the ability to encrypt, authenticate, and control network traffic.
Additionally, with the SD-WAN monitoring the enterprise beyond the traditional WAN, network policies can now be enforced across all locations and devices, improving performance, monitoring, and reporting.
Enhanced User/Employee Experience
Waiting for websites to load, files to open, and applications to respond can be frustrating for employees. Maintaining high availability with predictable service is a must, especially for critical enterprise applications. SD-WAN can dynamically route traffic based on application needs and employee use, creating an improved user experience.
Learn More About Your Network
Do you know the current state of your network? Your network performance and security are critical components of your overall IT and business health. With TPx’s free Network Security Evaluation, you will gain insights into your network security, productivity, and utilization.
Not only will you gain information into your network usage, but you may even find network vulnerabilities and security risks that could be a threat to your business. Take control of your network and get the insights you need to make good business decisions. Contact TPx to get started with your free evaluation today.