It’s hard to be in the middle. If you’re a mid-size business, you probably relate to the feel of having to provide up-market service at down-market prices. That means you’re always deciding between where to invest to provide the best return possible. This often plays out in your IT strategy, where a variety of solutions and costs can quickly add up and spin out of control if you don’t implement IT options that are business drivers rather than ideas that drive your business into the ground.
This choice often requires a lot of research, expertise, and competitive analysis. But when it comes to SD-WAN, adopting this technology is a no brainer.
SD-WAN, if you don’t already know, is a software-driven platform that overlays on your network and decouples it from relying on local hardware. While migrating your network to a software-driven solution might seem overwhelming at first, the positive results are immediate. SD-WAN is a saving grace to mid-market companies by providing the following abilities:
- Faster, more reliable data performance
- Network flexibility
- Variety of vendor options (and prices)
- Meet mid-market demands
- Better visibility into IT usage
1. UP Market Performance
Switching from MPLS to SD-WAN has proven to yield immediate benefits, like 5-20 times more bandwidth, improved connectivity redundancy, minimal downtime, and a network that is easier to manage. The result? Thousands of dollars are saved per month–both in cost and recouped employee hours.
SD-WAN allows mid-market companies to maximize the latest technology in the smartest way while staying small and nimble. What does that look like? Carrier redundancy, multi-modality support, and traffic and application prioritization–all with user-friendly interfaces that allow you to adapt on the fly. This is only further supported by the fact that SD-WAN itself can come in the following various shapes and sizes.
2. A variety of options
While choosing to adopt SD-WAN is viewed by some as a simple choice, there are still a variety of options that a mid-market business needs to consider. SD-WAN solutions can be carrier-managed, appliances, or cloud-based–and the benefit to having these options means you can pick the solution that best suits your business needs and budget, all without sacrificing quality.
3. Meet needs, don’t exceed them
The needs of mid-market businesses that utilize a network vary wildly, but most have the same thing in common–they’re using their network for a single purpose, such as voice or running an in-house app. That means you might be thinking, “we don’t need SD-WAN because all we use is voice.” This is even more of a reason to adopt SD-WAN because it’s a customizable, cost-efficient option that makes it so you’re not paying for more than what you need. Instead of an expensive and bloated MPLS network, you now have a streamlined and simpler SD-WAN solution that makes your mid-market business better at the specific tasks that matter to your bottomline–from higher bandwidth between locations to broader mobility options.
4. Gain insights, increase performance
SD-WAN makes managing your network easier and more transparent; you can analyze usage to make more informed and efficient decisions. Utilizing SD-WAN can help reduce expensive network costs, increase bandwidth where needed, and grow your bottom line by eliminating unneeded costs and maximizing areas of profit.
5. Change is easy
Despite high costs, low performance, and constantly feeling like you need saving from your current network, most mid-market companies remain stagnant–allowing the status quo to slowly erode their IT environment and potentially hurt business. Too many are laggards, intimidated by the old saying of “change is hard.” In the case of shifting to SD-WAN, however, it’s not.
Unlike the MPLS predecessor, there’s no heavy change in hardware thanks to its software-driven nature and the ability to adjust as needed doesn’t require archaic installations. Pair that with an IT spend management platform like vCom’s platform and you will have both the guidance and tools to smoothly transition to SD-WAN and immediately start growing your business around it.
