What is SD-WAN and why should your business care about it?

“SD-what?” I hear you say… let me explain!

Over the last 10 to 20 years, small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) with multiple sites and branches have had pretty limited choices for good connectivity and bandwidth.

This meant having to pay for what often amounted to expensive, low quality bandwidth, like buying a dedicated phone line for an internet connection without even being able to monitor or manage how often you were using this resource.

But for those with multiple locations – warehouses, offices interstate and so forth, what choice did they have?

Thankfully, today this has all changed with the introduction of technologies such as Cisco Secure SD-WAN. With business nbn wholesale solutions, this has really helped level the playing field and make enterprise level technology and connectivity more available and affordable for SMBs.

So, what is SD-WAN?

SD-WAN stands for a software-defined wide area network, which essentially translates to a smarter technology infrastructure that helps your business and your IT perform faster, better, and more securely.

Instead of needing those dedicated lines I mentioned, SD-WAN lets you take a single line and intelligently manage or move your available bandwidth to the devices, applications, or people that need it most.

The best part is running Cisco SD-WAN over a business nbn solution – including their dedicated fibre options – gives you a powerful combination for scaling up your IT performance to help your business succeed and grow.

Not only does this let your business stay more productive when using all the online applications and cloud services that are part of the landscape today, Cisco SD-WAN is also so easy to configure and manage, you don’t even need to be a techie to use it!

In fact, one of our Cisco customers – a marketing manager at URBNSURF in Melbourne – recently installed a Cisco Meraki router with SD-WAN capabilities himself, and the team started using it for better IT performance pretty much immediately!

Stay productive and stay secure

Cisco’s SD-WAN equipment comes with in-built security, which is extremely important, especially today. This year cybercrime against Australian small businesses is actually on the rise with criminals looking to take advantage of COVID-19 – to the tune of $29 billion per year.

One of our SMB customers – a printing business – was recently hacked and lost their printing templates as a result. This theft alone cost them $50,000 per day in lost revenue. So, the way to think about how you should manage security is to think about whatever ways you monetise the data or the intellectual property within your business and estimate what that is worth. And then protect it!

Cisco SD-WAN can help SMBs improve network speed, security and overall business efficiency. However, access to quality connectivity is needed to get all the benefits from using an SD-WAN.

To help our SMB customers achieve better IT performance and security at the same time, Cisco recently announced simplified reference designs for our Secure SD-WAN over business nbn wholesale solutions as part of the work we’re doing together to enhance and accelerate the digital capability of Australian SMBs.

In fact, we’re the first SD-WAN vendor to have conducted testing of our equipment over the nbn network, so our partners are equipped to help you implement the right solution to make it simple from day one!

To get started with SD-WAN, reach out to a trusted Cisco partner and business nbn accredited advisor.

They can also help you migrate to the nbn network or optimise your current service to make sure it’s running on a business nbn solution. No matter how big or small your budget is they can put together a digital strategy aligned to your short term needs, and longer term business goals.