SD-WAN For Remote Employees

Recap of SD-WAN

With the number of at home workers increasing from 4.7 million in January of 2020 to 70 million in April of 2020, employees started to realize the difficulties in staying productive while managing the not always reliable at home internet. The solution to this problem is implementing SD-WAN in the at-home office.

Early 2020, we looked at how SD-WAN can be utilized alongside managed firewalls and unified threat management to help create a secure environment for our at home workers. Now, we are going to discuss why SD-WAN plays an important role in future proofing your network while working remotely.

Why Businesses use SD-WAN:

If you don’t have SD-WAN in your at-home office, or are unfamiliar with the concept, it is time to start looking into it. The purpose of SD-WAN is to provide reliable, high throughput data channels by enabling the bonding of multiple internet access methods. For example, a company may be paying for two internet connections, such as a dedicated fiber connection via an ISP like Spectrum, and a cheaper broadband connection via the same ISP or a different one that is on-net at that location. Their fiber internet connection would be their primary circuit, but in case it goes down for some reason, they can switch over to their backup broadband connection. With the use of SD-WAN in this scenario, the technology is smart enough to automatically switch internet connections by realizing the primary is down or is backed up with heavy traffic. Having a backup connection paired with SD-WAN ensures that there will be no internet downtime in the office and no money lost.

SD-WAN at home:

Many employees working at home are finding trouble running important business apps like voice and video that need to function seamlessly when speaking with customers or coworkers. Although upgrading your bandwidth at home may increase internet speeds, it is not always the best solution. Not only is this an expensive solution, and not always reliable, the circuit alone will not prioritize business apps over non business apps like video games or YouTube streaming. SD-WAN can intelligently optimize your key business apps to ensure workers will not experience latency, jitter, or any crashes. Even if you are just on a single circuit alone, SD-WAN home office prioritizes critical applications over others.

Do you have a packed household with family members that are also constantly running applications? Do you rely on internet based phone calls, video conferencing, or SaaS based applications like Office 365? Do you connect to your office using a VPN connection? If any of these scenarios apply to you, SD-WAN is your solution to ensuring 100% uptime of business applications while working remotely.

Conectrix represents many providers that thrive in this category and can provide not only SD-WAN for the company office, but now at your home office as well. Even with COVID going away ideally in the near future, Gartner predicts there will still be many hybrid employees, so it is best to get educated on SD-WAN now. Conectrix strives to serve as a trusted advisor to our customers by helping them make the most informed IT decisions. Please reach out to us, and let us answer your questions today about SD-WAN or any other technologies.