We work hard to build a great team and work to improve our processes. However, with our reliance on running our business on the internet, how reliable is our network? Do we have a backup in case our carrier has a disruption? What is the cost of losing an hour or day of productivity in our company?
- January 22, 2015: A significant outage across several states, including Texas, California, and Florida.
- February 22, 2017: A significant outage affected the East Coast of the United States, and lasted for several hours and impacted internet, television, and phone services.
- December 27-28, 2018: A nationwide outage affected customers, disrupting internet, phone, and 911 services for nearly 48 hours.
- August 30, 2019: A major telecom provider experienced a significant outage that affected internet and phone services across several states and lasted for several hours.
- April 3-4, 2020: Affecting customers in multiple states lasted for nearly 24 hours and was reportedly caused by a system failure during a network upgrade.
- July 4, 2020: A major outage lasted for several hours and affected millions of customers.
- November 9, 2021: A widespread outage hit customers, affecting millions of users in major cities for several hours.
- July 8, 2022: A massive outage that lasted for over 15 hours affected millions of customers, cutting off internet, mobile, and landline services, as well as emergency services, banking, and government services.
Businesses in these areas heavily relied on their networks to maintain operations, deliver services, and ensure customer satisfaction. In other words, impacted businesses lost productivity. Enter SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network), a technology that offers your company a way to simplify and optimize their network management while providing unparalleled peace of mind for you.
SD-WAN is an advanced networking solution that decouples the network hardware from its control mechanism, allowing for more flexible and efficient management of wide-area networks. Traditional WANs (Wide Area Network) rely on fixed, hardware-centric approaches, which can be costly and cumbersome to manage, particularly for organizations with multiple branches or locations. SD-WAN, however, utilizes software-based controllers to intelligently direct traffic across a variety of connection types.
- Enhanced Network Reliability. SD-WAN provides reliability through its ability to use multiple connections simultaneously. If a primary connection fails, your SD-WAN can automatically reroute traffic through an alternative connection, ensuring that your operations can continue uninterrupted.
- Improved Security Across the Network. With sensitive data constantly flowing across your network, SD-WAN offers robust security features that help mitigate these risks with built-in security measures such as end-to-end encryption, firewalls, centralizes network management and advanced threat detection.
- Cost Efficiency and Better Resource Utilization. Traditional WANs often rely on expensive circuits, but SD-WAN offers a more cost-effective solution by allowing you to leverage a mix of lower-cost broadband connections. With a centralized management interface, your IT teams can more easily monitor and maintain the network, reducing the need for specialized staff and minimizing the time spent on troubleshooting and manual configuration. For leaders, this translates to lower operational expenses and a more efficient use of human resources.
- Optimized Application Performance. In your business, the performance of critical applications directly impacts productivity and customer satisfaction. Ensuring that these applications run smoothly is crucial. SD-WAN provides your business with the tools to optimize application performance across the network.
- Scalability and Flexibility for Growing Businesses. As your business expands, networking needs become more complex. Opening new locations, adding remote workers, or integrating new cloud services can strain traditional WANs, which are often rigid and difficult to scale. SD-WAN, is designed to be highly scalable and flexible, making it easier for your business to adapt to changing needs.
- Comprehensive Visibility and Control. SD-WAN typically include dashboards that provide real-time visibility into network performance, application usage, and security status. This level of detail allows your team to monitor the health of their network, identify potential issues before they become problems, and make data-driven decisions to optimize performance and security.
SD-WAN provides you with the tools your team needs to manage your networks more effectively, securely, and cost-efficiently. Ultimately, it delivers the peace of mind you need to focus on the core business objectives. You can’t afford to not have SD-WAN. Interesting in learning more, contact me or https://itel.com/contact-itel/
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Strategic Client Success Leader | Telecommunications & Technology Expert | Program Management | Business Operations & Development | Driving Business Growth through Customer Experience Excellence
6 个月Thanks for sharing this insightful article, SD-WAN solutions are indeed the best connectivity option today. They should include multiple providers and offer diverse network paths - such as wireline, wireless and even satellite - to ensure service continuity and seamless failover.