How to Reduce Hardware and Software Support Costs Using Lavelle Networks SD-WAN Solutions?

2020 has been a roller coaster ride for the information technology sectors. With lockdown all over the world for nearly most of the year, decentralization of work became a really important issue for most of the sectors.

Amidst the lockdowns work from home became an important part of several different companies around the world. In a way work from home has been effective for most of these companies.

The enterprises can now effectively spend less on physical locations and workspaces and increase their working potential and profitability by allowing the employees to work from their residences. Still, with working from home, a few factors like data security, scalability, and maintaining performance standards become a challenge for the companies following this model.

All the above problems can be solved by using Lavelle Network’s SD-WAN solutions. The company’s cloud-based solutions not only reduce the individual needs of hardware setup and maintenance but also take away the software complexities faced by the different companies using the traditional MPLS service.

Ultimately this provides the enterprise a huge cost saving in terms of resources spent and features available. In fact, this was just the direct way in which Lavelle’s SD-WAN saves the expenses of the company. Discussed below are the several indirect ways in which cost savings are applied for the firms.

SD-WAN: A comprehensive introduction

A Software-defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) is a network architecture that is developed virtually and helps business enterprises to leverage limitless possibilities of combination for transport services. This custom development solution can be used for a wide variety of applications that range from MPLS to LTE and broadband internet services.

Talking about its operations, in layman terms, SD-WAN functions over a centralized control function to navigate direct traffic across WAN in a more secure manner. This method of securing data over a fixed network increases application performance and ensures a prominent user experience, resulting in improved productivity, and reduced costs for IT.

Interestingly, the WANs that we rely on for completing the major IT operations were never designed for conventional routers but were made for cloud operations. WANs operate in a linear fashion and ensure effectiveness by backhauling all the traffic that is processed through them. This traffic also includes cloud traffics that is exchanged between two different entities in a working structure.

Unlike the normal WAN architecture, the SD-WAN model is designed to ensure compatible performance with applications that are hosted over the data centers and private clouds. Moreover, the SD-WAN application ensures the efficient exchange of data packets over several SaaS services without dropping the application performance.

The future of SD-WAN

Before we move over to the future of SD-WAN, it is essential to do a comparative analysis of why SD-WAN is more efficient than the primary SDN. While SDN has been effectively used in the traditional telecom sector and data center infrastructures, it has been successful in reducing the costs over operations and also improves stability and expansion.

SD-WAN has proven to be a more cost-effective solution that has accelerated the performance of several MPLS networks.

Listed below is the comparative analysis of the same:

Source: https://www.silver-peak.com/sd-wan/sd-wan-explained

How can businesses reduce hardware & software costs with SD-WAN?

• Reduced cost of infrastructure

SD-WAN can be a great solution in reducing the costs of infrastructure. Since essential networking costs can be used from the investments over the infrastructure, these solutions will help out the hardware appliances to manage data connections and initiate multi-level expansion for the small and medium-sized businesses.

The use of SD-WAN for your networking will ensure that the businesses reduce the cost of their operations, no matter the size. Businesses, preferably small, can save big by switching to SD-WAN and reducing hardware requirements in the existing infrastructure. However, the only investment that you might need is connectivity hardware.

• Improved use of resources

SD-WAN can be a reliable resource in integrating your existing framework with it and thereby, save the costs by making better use of your existing resources. While it might not look like a long-term cost-effective plan but SD-WAN is efficient enough in reducing costs with a number of centralized management features over the short term.

• Saving at every level

Initially, SD-WAN induces zero-touch provisioning (ZTP) features where the deployment can be handled by minimal engineer interaction and saving time.

Secondly, SD-WAN’s centralized management features enable the pushing of patches from a remote location and save efforts over traveling.

Lastly, the use of a single appliance cuts down costs of maintenance.

• An eco-friendly approach

In the present time frame where businesses are looking for new and effective ways of developing sustainable and eco-friendly ways to operate business infrastructure, SD-WAN can be a great solution to offer reduced infrastructure requirements.

While the infrastructure has been re-structured with minimal intervention of lower mechanisms, companies will be cutting down on carbon emissions. Moreover, the Software-Defined WAN appliances are effective in replacing a number of network devices, thereby, saving power as well. Moreover, its remote management features and mobility in installation help cut on the major carbon footprint that is utilized in employee travel.

With its remote management and zero-touch deployment options, the traveling is limited to remote sites under extreme cases. Besides that, SD-WAN can also incorporate other prominent remote features that help make business flexible working.

• SD-WAN decreases the cost of growth

Every running business aims to grow over the long run. Growth for a business is always measured by success and better opportunities to initiate a fixed source of revenue. For the growing businesses, it can be a tedious task to spend over expanding their work across geographies and such moves are often expensive in terms of infrastructure and network costs.

SD-WAN can be a leading solution to cut down on costs while shifting the base of operations from one place to another. While businesses may prefer the use of LTE or MPLS connections to exchange data, it can be a costly affair.

SD-WAN, on the other hand, allows businesses to connect with a new location regardless of the connection that keeps the data up and running. It also helps businesses cut down on bandwidth costs as it introduces the system to load-balancing across multiple links. Besides that, SD-WAN also offers businesses with selective control and enables decrease in the cloud connectivity costs by making the use of a private virtual connection with network functions virtualization (NFV).

Considering the effectiveness that SD-WAN puts in the table, it is surely a great move to switch over.

(Source: https://daisycomms.co.uk/resource/sd-wan-can-reduce-networking-costs)

Advantages of switching to SD-WAN

• Scalability

The traditional MPLS solutions are too rigid for upgrading and scaling according to the changing needs of the industry. But with SD-WAN solutions which are cloud-based new members can be easily added to the chain. This makes the traffic handling of a company smoother. The company does not need to halt its operations for adding resources and devices and thus saves the cost of hardware.

• Performance

The new era of technology demands more optimized solutions for cloud-based computing, big data analytics, and social business. The older system architectures are not optimized for handling such cloud-based applications. Therefore in case of increased traffic, the system can crash, wasting a lot of time and creating big losses for the company.

The SD-WAN connections are optimized for handling high traffic and switching it if necessary through the fastest and most reliable networks. This creates performance optimization and avoids huge losses from downtime.

• Visibility

The data inputs in any general information sector company is huge. The network should be capable of taking in and storing this huge data. But the second step after storing comes monitoring. Monitoring is essential for finding different modes in the network, faults in the system, and even for analysis of any failure for further optimization.

On top of that, the data generated today come in all kinds of forms like instant messaging, email applications, video streaming, and peer-to-peer connectivity. Such heterogeneous data makes the older systems cave in far more easily. Data visibility becomes essential for the network.

With the use of Lavelle’s SD-WAN visibility of data becomes easier and a lot smoother. Companies can track and reroute traffic according to their needs. Such improved visibility also helps in tracking down problems in the system faster. Also, the heads of the company can monitor the several inflow and outflow of data easily. Overall this improves the operational efficiency of the company without using any external software and increases profitability.

• Ease of Initial setup

Traditional network setups are hardware-based systems. This means, to set up a system the company needs to invest in a lot of hardware and then set it up through complex procedures. All in all, this takes a few weeks, even months to start functioning properly.

Unlike the MPLS setups, SD-WAN setups do not even require IT professionals to visit the physical locations of the employee or the office. The network bandwidth can be easily deployed from any device with just a little experience. As in this model, the software runs as in the cloud among multiple tenants the company can avoid purchasing consoles and other hardware to individually manage systems.

• Configuring systems

Older systems require manual reconfigurations. This can lead to manual errors and make problem-solving slow and complex. SD-WAN simplifies the whole architecture, makes installations and configurations simple, and gives faster bandwidth options.

Businesses can save money by using all available resources, including inexpensive internet services. The SD-WAN dynamically selects a cost-effective connection and links to route traffic for faster data access and transfer.

• Security

For any enterprise data security is one of the key factors. The heterogeneous structure of data becomes really difficult for IT teams to constantly monitor for suspicious malware and other threats. Though MPLS networks can handle the traffic without compromising speed and performance with the ever-increasing complexity of the data, these systems start to break down, especially while handling cloud-based data.

SD-WAN is optimized for cloud-based activities, therefore it has several security measures installed in it. End-to-end encryption, as well as device and endpoint authentication all these make the network a lot more secure. Companies can also integrate third-party security applications with existing SD-WAN solutions. This allows more firewalls and a better security perimeter.

A major benefit of cloud-based WAN networks is that the security is unified and therefore better monitored. Companies can scale the available strong security measure existing on the cloud according to their traffic and even customize the different aspects of it. This allows enterprises to specifically secure all the devices on the network at once. This is a better solution than previous networks where firewall deployment was to be done physically from a device.

Why choose Lavelle Network’s ScaleAOn SD-WAN?

Considering the tools that come into play when you decide to switch over from your traditional networks to SD-WAN, you should also ensure that you receive the best of services from a leading brand. Relax, we got you covered over this one. Lavelle Networks are the leading providers of SD-WAN across the country as they offer their users with a seamless connectivity experience.

You can easily secure your network and ensure accelerated performance over a network that makes the use of hybrid WAN technology. Come, experience the superior networking experience with the best in the field at Lavelle Networks.

Opt for a centrally orchestrated SD-WAN solution to improve user experience and to simplify operations today with Lavelle Networks ScaleAOn SD-WAN Solutions.

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