If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught businesses large and small one lesson, it’s the need to be agile. The ability to adopt and adapt new processes, reach customers, and connect diverse and remote employee groups are now a given.
Many large companies found themselves ahead of the coronavirus curve thanks to the deployment of Software Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN). This ‘back office’ technology has revolutionized the way the corporate headquarters’ network connects to branch offices and the people across the organization. The ability to dial up bandwidth and deploy ‘apps’ to enable remote working, as one example, showed SD-WAN to be a shrewd investment.
IDC found that “migration challenges and the complexity of managing and operating a hybrid network environment have resulted in managed SD-WAN services outgrowing the DIY approach in most of the markets in Asia/Pacific”.*
Our expertise in providing that managed service has AT&T positioned in the Leaders Category in the IDC MarketScape: Asia/Pacific Communications SP SD-WAN Managed Services 2020 Vendor Assessment.*
We constantly stay in touch with our customers to better understand their needs. Integration with security, unified communications and local area networks is critical, and not all SD-WAN technologies act the same. AT&T has tried and tested several SD-WAN vendor technologies, so that we can consult enterprises regarding the best solution for their requirements.
It’s great to see the IDC MarketScape acknowledging the pioneering role AT&T has played in software-defined networking. The report’s conclusion that “this has allowed AT&T to challenge and win against incumbents in some of the Asia/Pacific markets such as Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong”* speaks for itself.
What exactly is SD-WAN? AT&T SD-WAN allows companies to build high-performance wide area networks (WANs) using relatively low-cost and commercially available broadband Internet links, to connect their branch locations to corporate resources. It gives the user greater control of network traffic through a centralized control function incorporating application and routing policies that they define. This enables highly secure, dynamic, application-aware network traffic management for greater security and efficiency. It also provides site-by-site flexibility because SD-WAN and non-SD-WAN sites can be combined on the same network.
How does SD-WAN benefit business? It gives visibility into network and applications performance. Better control of data flows comes with cost-effective, scalable connectivity options such as broadband and Internet into a network. Perhaps most importantly, SD-WAN provides a higher level of security by encrypting and tunneling data, with the ability to layer additional firewalls, and cloud security options to create an integrated solution.
Customers don’t have to deploy SD-WAN across their entire infrastructure all at once, but instead can migrate to SD-WAN in phases with other sites co-existing on the same network. An experienced service provider can make this transition a lot easier.
If you’d like to learn more, then please get in touch directly or click this link for more information on our SD-WAN services.
*Source: IDC, “IDC MarketScape: Asia/Pacific Communications SP SD-WAN Managed Services 2020 Vendor Assessment”, Doc #AP46973620 , February 2021
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