The business case for managed SD-WAN services

We live in a connected world. Every entity today is a digital entity, and hence, connecting people and companies has never been more important. The competitive ability of a company today depends on its capability to deliver great experiences with increased agility and performance. The network is at the center of all digital initiatives, and is fundamental to support and manage software-defined, high-performance hybrid environments. Connecting users, machines, sensors, and devices at the edge, connecting from the edge to the cloud, and then into and across multiple clouds enables business intelligence for actionable business insights.

Any kind of digital transformation begins and ends with the network. Network strategies need to shift to support growing business demand and ensure long-term viability in today’s world. The network is the backbone that enables connectivity across edge devices and things to applications with and across multiple clouds. Network flexibility, performance, and availability are some of the most significant barriers to cloud adoption.  Network connectivity and performance acts as the foundation layer, supporting modern digital enterprises and allowing businesses to evolve and adapt business models rapidly.

As applications and workloads move to the cloud and the workforce harnesses the power of cloud technologies, the data traffic patterns, performance requirements and capacity needs of traditional enterprises are shifting. To resolve these challenges, many enterprises have started adopting SD-WANs, which give them greater agility, business flexibility and significant cost savings.  As SD-WAN is based on a virtual network architecture, it allows enterprises to create reliable connections to cloud providers directly from branch offices or data centers.

Challenges of deploying SD-WANs

SD-WANs are not plug-and-play and require considerable understanding of an organization’s existing infrastructure and applications for success. As most current IT infrastructure is wide-ranging and complex, it means that the SD-WAN project requires careful planning and integration. The solution needs to manage multiple network access types, such as wireless, MPLS, dedicated and broadband internet, and route many different types of traffic securely according to enterprise policies. While SD-WAN may sound like a simple concept, the fact is that designing and building a complex network needs to be carefully executed to fulfil expectations and provide optimum performance. With huge business dependence on the network, every organization wants to deploy SD-WANs with minimal disruption to their day-to-day business operations. For example, when an organization introduces new services, such as cloud-based collaboration or unified communications (UC) functionality, real-world application usage can shape and strain the network in unexpected ways. This is challenging for traditional networks, which are rigid and hard to reconfigure.

The benefits of partnering with a managed service provider

To overcome the challenges of deploying SD-WANs, enterprises can look at partnering with a managed service provider. The service provider can provide a managed services platform that includes automation, AIOps and predictive analytics capabilities, resulting in an efficient network operations service to suit the most demanding requirements. MSPs can help in providing a managed SD-WAN service by leveraging the best technologies to fit the requirements of an enterprise based on application footprint, cloud strategy and usage policy. MSPs have the experience and expertise of innovating and investing heavily in every layer of network infrastructure, from mobile, internet, cloud, data center, security and SD-WAN services. This enables MSPs to offer comprehensive and differentiated end-to-end networking solutions with enhanced quality of service for end-user and customer experience.

Tosupport the cloud and other application delivery requirements, SD-WAN requires much more than standard network support. End-to-end troubleshooting is more complex and involves skills across the IT, application, and security domains. Some critical benefits that a managed SD-WAN service can provide include:

•  Proactive maintenance: At the heart of an MSP’s support operations is advanced network predictive analytics, which can help enterprises avoid 95% of network issues. Experienced MSPs open a majority of trouble tickets proactively by using artificial intelligence to identify any patterns or anomalies. This allows them to detect and alert on issues before they can impact on your business.
•  Overcoming the skills gap: An MSP can help enterprises overcome the skills gap with their trained people, established processes and proven tools. The MSP team becomes an extension of an organization’s IT team to support and solve any issues, including new projects or changes.
•  Support: Most MSPs have Global Operations Centers (GOCs) that use a follow-the-sun support model to provide round-the-clock customer service on a 24x7 basis.
• Dedicated cloud and application connectivity:  Experienced global MSPs have the advantage of global Tier-1 IP networks with the added advantage of ISP relationships which interconnect the world’s biggest businesses and provide direct connectivity to cloud and SaaS providers. This enables enterprises to experience optimized network performance. Enterprises must choose MSPs which have a SD-WAN service that is cloud-ready by design with dedicated connectivity to public and private cloud services. In addition, MSPs provide direct interconnection to the web via secure gateways and to the network of any partners. MSPs also deploy virtual network functions from local cloud centers into asset-lite branches for faster time to market and increased agility. MSPs also provide a customer portal to allow enterprises to make changes to their network functions directly.
• Branch connectivity: Amanaged SD-WAN service provider can provide a range of connectivity options to converge public internet and private network connectivity into a seamless hybrid network. Most MSPs have relationships with multiple local providers and ISPs worldwide with deep insights into their performance. This allows them to pick the best combination of speed, resilience, and performance for each site – including MPLS, dedicated internet, broadband internet, and 4G/5G/LTE. Some MSPs also offer a branch connectivity service which includes managed smart SD-WAN edge devices, which together with the SD-WAN platform completes the SD-WAN solution.
•  Ensuring high performance:  MSPs can provide real-time streaming network analytics to offer deep insights into application performance, network security, and the end-user experience. This enables them to deliver traffic visibility, load balancing, cloud optimization and traffic prioritization, based on information analyzed across the network. This ensures that the application traffic is fully optimized in real-time for all end users. Visibility into applications trends also allows proactive adjustment of the network for the launch of new applications or if their use increases.
• Security: Using the cloud, many MSPs provide integrated security delivered from the cloud, which includes firewall, malware detection, intrusion protection services (IPS), and URL filtering for all traffic.

Additionally, an MSP with a multi-vendor SD-WAN offering can bridge different SD-WAN technologies to prevent vendor lock-in and provide integration with other network features and services chaining, including security and other features.

In conclusion, SD-WANs can offer huge transformational benefits to enterprises, if implemented well. A managed SD-WAN service provider can prove to be of huge help as they can not only identify the right-fit SD-WAN solution that can be consumed as a service, but will help in customizing the solution to ensure that the business outcomes are met. 

This article has been written by Manoj Chitgopeker, Senior Director, Managed Network & Collaboration services, NTT Ltd in India