????SD-WAN: Transforming Business from the Top Down ??

Why should a business shift from traditional legacy Wide Area Networking (WAN) to the dynamic realm of Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN)? The answer, rather than being purely technical, must be rooted in solid business reasoning. Often, technologists, those who may not excel in documentation, approach problems from the bottom up. They select a technology solution first, followed by a retrofitting of underlying processes to accommodate this choice, and finally, the business is cajoled into embracing the newly introduced technological widgets. Unfortunately, this engagement model is a major contributor to the high failure rate of technology projects. It boils down to a fundamental flaw: the problem being solved does not fundamentally align with core business objectives.

In most cases an enterprise will select a brand and then move to panel beat the solution to fit the product instead of making the product fit the solution.

In the wise words of Steve Jobs, a luminary far brighter than myself:

"Starting with the customer" does not mean you double down on your app when 70% of your target audience simply do not use it ...

The correct approach is a top-down one, commencing at the business level. This process is elegantly detailed in the article, "The Skeleton of a Request for Information." The specifics may vary between service providers and enterprises as each entity operates with distinct critical success factors.

Critical Success Factors for Service Providers

For service providers, the critical success factors may include:

1. Reduce Churn: Correcting poor service assurance in the legacy environment during technology deployment.
2. Reduce Headcount: Utilizing SD-WAN to manage the same number of links with fewer resources.
3. Improve Revenue: Achieved by reducing the time between ordering and billing, thanks to quicker provisioning and activation of last-mile services.
4. Reduce Operational Costs: Leveraging regional distribution technologies, like Carrier Ethernet, instead of MPLS, while maintaining functionality.
5. Competitive Edge: Staying relevant in a market poised for heavy SD-WAN investment over the next five years, as highlighted in this Network World article.

Critical Success Factors for Enterprises

Enterprises may have critical success factors such as:

1. Improve Employee Productivity: Implementing branch office solutions that enhance availability and reliability.
2. Enhance Data Protection Reputation: Ensuring network security to safeguard against breaches or unauthorized access.
3. Reduce Operational Costs: Leveraging cloud-based technologies for operational efficiencies.
4. Transform Headcount: Reducing dependence on manual telnet configurations in favor of automated orchestration.

These identified factors serve as the bedrock for establishing business requirements for SD-WAN technology. They lay the foundation for crafting technical functional specifications that encompass the underlying processes. With a clearly defined scope of work, organizations can then select the SD-WAN solution that best aligns with their unique needs. This top-down approach offers a higher likelihood of success compared to the traditional, bottom-up, techie-centric method.

Orange Business Services, a prominent player in the SD-WAN landscape, highlights the primary drivers behind SD-WAN adoption. These priorities are distilled from customer feedback obtained through surveys. One of the central objectives is to simplify connectivity, following the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle. An earlier article I penned on LinkedIn, titled "The Primary Goal of SD-WAN Should Be to Make Networking Less Complicated," resonates with this theme.

In my role at Fusion Broadband South Africa , which is the leading specialized SD-WAN provider in South Africa, I'm dedicated to connecting the world of Internet-inhabiting things using SD-WAN. I welcome your bottom-up perspectives on these top-down insights.

The SD-WAN solutions from Fusion provide a replacement for traditional WAN routers and are agnostic to WAN transport technologies. The solution provides dynamic, policy-based, application path selection across multiple WAN connections and supports service chaining for additional services such as WAN optimization and firewalls.

This article places a stronger emphasis on the importance of aligning technology solutions with core business objectives, providing a more detailed examination of critical success factors for both service providers and enterprises, and offering a more cohesive narrative flow.

Contact Fusion

Experience uninterrupted connectivity with Fusion's SD-WAN! ?? Say goodbye to downtime and connection issues. Fusion makes it affordable & easy for businesses to stop downtime by fusing multiple connection types from different ISPs together. It's so seamless, you'll never notice when a connection has failed. No more frustrating reconnecting, refreshing, or redialing!

Learn more: Link to contact Fusion about their SD-WAN Solution! ????

#SDWAN #Connectivity #BusinessContinuity