Ensure connectivity by prioritizing processes
Your enterprise has many options when it comes to internet connectivity, and making decisions can be challenging. How you connect depends on what you’re doing, where you’re doing it, and how many people are involved. In an agile business, the rhythm is always changing, and you need to adjust your steps to keep up. The good news is that today’s networking technology makes it easy to do so.
Prioritize your needs
All organizations need to use the internet, and some processes require more bandwidth or prioritization than others. “Deciding which applications are critical to your business will help you determine the right solution,” says Les Wood, director of Product Marketing at Spectrum Enterprise. “If there is a heightened need to reduce latency or assured bandwidth is needed, dedicated internet services provide the answer you are looking for.”
Additionally, the reliance on today’s cloud applications suggests a need to include a dedicated internet access solution as a part of your network. For your most critical applications — the ones your business depends on to survive — you need a network that reflects your priorities, and a software defined wide area network (SD-WAN) can give you the visibility and control to adjust priorities as needs change.
SD-WAN maximizes your network’s performance and your organization’s ability to be productive and efficient. It also empowers your IT department with better insights into your network’s traffic and utilization.
Behind the scenes, your IT staff will gain visibility into performance, routing, configurations, firewall settings, and various network components through a centralized portal, saving time and making it simple to upgrade additional locations.
Let technology decide
What about noncritical applications? Are you stuck with the luck of the draw: lightning-fast in one session and molasses in the next?
SD-WAN prioritizes network traffic according to your needs, whether your employees are at headquarters or a branch office or are working remotely. In Foundry’s “2020 State of the Network Study,” over 50% of the responding business and IT leaders said SD-WAN improves management and reporting, increases resilience, and boosts security.
“With software-defined networking, the technology looks at the traffic you’re sending and assesses the best routes, based on your priorities and current availability,” Wood says.
It also makes network management easier. Instead of playing traffic cop, routing requests through four or five devices for each location, IT administrators let software do the work. If they want to make changes, they can see and control everything from one location.
There are two ways Spectrum Enterprise can help deploy SD-WAN. Organizations can extend an existing native Ethernet WAN, a hybrid SD-WAN/Ethernet approach that uses a SD-WAN service to quickly “stitch” new sites and off-net locations into a single WAN. For organizations that don’t need to support an existing private network, such as an Ethernet network, setting up an overarching SD-WAN is an economical way to quickly create an SD-WAN network.
For both types of deployment, Spectrum Enterprise can also manage the connections to create a single-source provider or organizations can bring their own connections.
Learn more about SD-WAN and reliable network management technologies.