What are the Benefits of SD-WAN to Your Business?

 The most popular WAN technology for businesses is the Multiprotocol Label Switching, especially for enterprises with several remote sites. It is fast, widely accessible, and reliable. But it can also be costly when your business expands. These are among the many reasons why a lot of companies are opting for Software-Defined Wide Area Network or SD-WAN, as their main connectivity solution.

Different Types of SD-WAN

1. On-prem SD-WAN – deployed solely on premises. It is cheaper than other SD-WAN architectures because it can only create connections between remote sites. This is an ideal option for companies that host most of their business applications in a local area.
2. Cloud-Enabled SD-WAN – can use cloud gateways for communication between cloud applications. This can include anything from your office applications to your cloud based CRM software.
3. Cloud Enabled Plus Backbone – it capitalizes on the nearest point of presence of a service provider. This could be the fiber optic line that could provide your company network with a significant performance boost.

 

 

Benefits of Using SD-WAN

1. Streamlined Network Management – SD-WAN Columbia SC can decouple traffic management, the monitoring, as well as the management plain from the hardware. There’s no need to use certain hardware or software components in every remote site. All that you need will be added into centralized and policy driven management interface.
2. Tailored to Your IT Infrastructure - SD-WAN, particularly the solutions that are cloud enabled, can be customized to the specific IT needs of your organization. The bandwidth could also be decreased or increased on demand – ensuring important applications have access to the network resources even if the loads keep on fluctuating.
3. Increased Performance – another important selling point of the SD-WAN services is the improved agility and network performance. SD-WAN can move your traffic through the most reliable and fastest connection automatically, the most common network concerns such as latency and jitter are reduced significantly.
4. End to End Encryption – Firms that forward the WAN traffic through the MPLS have a tendency to concentrate their security policies toward a corporate and centralized data center. But with SD-WAN, all of the end points will be covered with end to end encryption. You can also create user accounts, edit them, and even remove them from one management plane. All these make it simple to control the access privileges of partners, guests, employees, etc.
5. Network Reliability – An SD-WAN solution can identify outages and even cause a failover that will switch sessions to a different connection at once. This will make sure that your core business will not be disrupted in case of blackouts or brownouts in your area.

 

Regardless of how big your company is, SD-WAN solution is an investment that you won’t regret. It is not only flexible and cost effective but also gives your company a step up when it comes to east of management, scalability, security, and performance. Call SpartanTec, Inc. now for more information.

 

SpartanTec, Inc.
Myrtle Beach, SC 29577
(843) 420-9760
https://www.spartantec.com/

SpartanTec, Inc.
Columbia, SC 29201
(803) 408-7166
http://manageditservicescolumbia.com/

Serving: Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Columbia, Wilmington, Fayetteville, Florence

The 5 Keys to Self-Healing, Secure SD-WAN

 

SD-WAN solutions have become increasingly popular as organizations request fast, scalable, and flexible connectivity among different network environments, and seek to lower overall total cost of ownership (TCO) while preserving user experience. But the wrong SD-WAN solution can significantly inhibit an organization’s ability to quickly adapt to changing business demands, not least because it creates new security headaches.

Here are five requirements for a Secure SD-WAN solution that’s flexible, scalable, and fit for the needs of today’s distributed enterprises.

It goes beyond the branch.

SD-WAN is perhaps best understood for supporting complex branch deployments and helping organizations reduce their reliance on branch routers and other legacy technologies. Effective SD-WAN Columbia SC solutions go well beyond branch office needs, however. Their functionality can extend to home office and teleworker use—  especially appliances with built-in LTE for consistent connectivity—  and among distributed

 

 

clouds. SD-WAN solutions also need to come in virtual versions that are available in multi-cloud environments and have deeper integration to enable cloud on-ramp, enabling efficient SaaS adoption.

It offers intuitive orchestration and zero-touch deployments.

Both of these features enable faster configuration rollouts at scale, often within minutes, to enable the best possible performance of collaboration applications such as VoIP, videoconferencing, and various SaaS applications, even for remote users based far away from the corporate data center. Orchestration enables overlay (VPN) automation for the most complex network with intuitive workflows.

It prioritizes critical applications and enables self-healing WAN.

Connectivity alone isn’t enough, especially in a remote work-heavy environment. A solution needs to identify a broad set of applications to meet all use cases, while advanced self-healing WAN automation will provide consistent user experience on any transport for any user. Many SD-WAN solutions only support limited use cases, limited numbers of users, and/or specific environments. Caveat emptor.

It includes integrated security.

The difference between SD-WAN and Secure SD-WAN is that the latter is a solution, while the former is a connectivity offering providing another conduit for the bad guys to attack your network. An overlay security solution can’t adapt to dynamic connectivity environments; security needs to be embedded into each SD-WAN device, enabling home users, branch office users, and the data center to use a common set of security policies and enforcement criteria. In true Secure SD-WAN, networking, connectivity, and security functions are so tightly integrated they’re the one solution meeting three needs, instead of three discrete solutions.

It offers comprehensive analytics and reporting.

A Secure SD-WAN solution needs to help organizations gain visibility into network and application performance (both real-time and historical statistics). That includes enhanced analytics as well as enhanced compliance. A single console and rich SD-WAN analytics can help customers fine-tune their business and security policies to improve quality of experience for all users.

 

SpartanTec, Inc. is partner of Fortinet. We offer reliable and and professional IT services to effectively solve your IT problems while protecting your business and network from various online threats. Call us now for more information.

 

SpartanTec, Inc.
Myrtle Beach, SC 29577
(843) 420-9760
https://www.spartantec.com/

SpartanTec, Inc.
Columbia, SC 29201
(803) 408-7166
http://manageditservicescolumbia.com/

Serving: Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Columbia, Wilmington, Fayetteville, Florence

Securing SD-WAN in Distributed Healthcare Environments

Organizations are becoming increasingly reliant on digital capabilities across industries, and this is no different in the healthcare space. New technology has enabled patients to take a more hands-on role in their care, simplified patient/physician communication, and improved the ability of patients to get care in rural locations. For this adoption of technology to be effective, however, healthcare providers must ensure they have the necessary WAN (wide area network) infrastructure to accommodate more requests and greater bandwidth needs.

Digitalization in Healthcare

The healthcare space has been quick to adopt connected IoMT devices, mobile applications, and bring your own device (BYOD) policies as a means to improve patient care and experience. For example, there are 3.7 million IoMT devices in use today, and 66.9 percent of health executives report using SaaS cloud applications. Each of these technologies relies on network access to dynamically communicate data between patients and doctors in real-time. In the healthcare space, the speed and accuracy with which this data is transmitted are especially important, as it can be lifesaving. Cloud-based applications store data offsite, meaning hospitals need their networks to be operating with extremely low latency to access this information without unnecessary delays. Additionally, healthcare networks must have the bandwidth capabilities to accommodate the greater number of endpoints requesting access to the network without sacrificing performance. Finally, all of these additional connections to the network represent an increased risk, as cybercriminals leverage this expanded attack surface to launch frequent sophisticated attacks, such as ransomware and DDoS. This means that healthcare organizations need to increase their level of network controls to ensure patient privacy and HIPAA compliance.

The Effect on WAN

The digitalization of the network and resources has had a largely negative effect on the performance of traditional WANs. The traditional static WAN infrastructure is hard-pressed to keep pace with the shifting workloads and resources brought on by the cloud and virtualization. This has led to erratic application performance and decreased efficiency, as all requests must still be cycled through the central enterprise datacenter. Additionally, WANs can be difficult to secure. And as more devices and applications are brought into the mix, IT teams using more point solutions make securing and managing user-owned devices more difficult. Overall, traditional WANs are not equipped to handle distributed environments due to lack of flexibility, bandwidth limitations, and expensive infrastructure and MPLS.

The Shift to SD-WAN

To more effectively manage distributed environments without sacrificing performance, organizations are once again looking to virtualization, this time through the implementation of SD-WAN, or software-defined wide area networks. The ability to control the broader enterprise network through the cloud that SD-WAN provides solves many of the issues healthcare organizations face when trying to add virtualization to existing WANs. SD-WANs Columbia SC are able to improve efficiency and productivity in the following five key areas, making them ideal for digital healthcare:

 

• Automatic response to shifting application policies while distributing traffic across multiple locations
• On-demand connectivity
• Flexible network scaling as traffic grows, maintaining peak performance at all hours
• Adding and reducing bandwidth as needed
• Simplified infrastructure for improved manageability.

Additionally, SD-WANs are more cost efficient than traditional WANs, as they do not rely on MPLS.

Securing SD-WAN in Healthcare

As healthcare providers make the transition from WAN to SD-WAN, security infrastructure is a critical consideration, especially as increased digitalization widens the attack surface. Growing numbers of connected devices and application use mean an increased percentage of valuable healthcare data is susceptible to cybercriminals. To mitigate these risks, organizations often deploy separate SD-WAN and security controls, such as a next-generation firewall. However, this leaves room for security gaps as well as performance bottlenecks. This is because traditional perimeter defenses are less effective in distributed environments, as the perimeter becomes more transparent and porous. Effective security controls have to be able to adapt with a flexible SD-WAN infrastructure, as well as to the numerous devices accessing it. To secure the transition to SD-WAN and digital healthcare, Fortinet has developed an SD-WAN enabled next-generation firewall that addresses these security challenges without hindering performance. For example, FortiGate Firewalls offer scalability to support thousands of devices across distributed locations through the industry’s highest throughput, as well as the ability to update application IP addresses and ports for efficient routing. In addition to high performance, secured SD-WANs from Fortinet offer high-speed inspection of SSL encrypted data, as well as visibility into applications, users, and threats. Furthermore, Fortinet provides simple, centralized management, through FortiManager, enabling single pane of glass visibility across distributed environments to align security efforts even across multi-cloud environments.

Final Thoughts

New technology in the healthcare space has improved patient care and experience around the world. To maintain this level of innovation, healthcare organizations need to be able to offer a level of performance that can keep pace with demand, while ensuring data protection and HIPAA compliance. Secured SD-WAN makes this possible.

 

Call SpartanTec, Inc. now for more information about SD-WAN.

Columbia, SC 29201
(803) 408-7166
http://manageditservicescolumbia.com/

cities served:
Columbia, West Columbia, Cayce, St Andrews, Lexington, Oak Grove

A Quick Guide To SD-WAN

You’ve probably heard the word SD-WAN before. But do you have an idea what it actually means? SD-WAN or software defined wide area network is a virtual WAN architecture that lets businesses use a mix of transport services like broadband internet services, LTE, or MPLS to connect users to certain applications securely.

SD-WAN makes use of a centralized control function to intelligently and securely direct traffic across the wide area network. This will boost the performance of the application and provide top notch user experience, which can result into improved agility, business productivity, as well as lower IT costs.

Traditional wide area network that were based on the conventional routers weren’t made for the cloud. They generally need to backhaul all traffic like the cloud destined traffic, from a branch office to a headquarters data center or a hub where complex security inspection solutions can be applied. The delay that’s caused by backhaul will impair application performance, which leads to lost productivity and poor user experience.

Compared to the conventional router-centric WAN architecture, an SD-WAN Columbia SC model is made for applications that are hosted in an on-premise data center, private or public clouds, as well as SaaS solutions like Dropbox, Office 365, Workday, and Salesforce.com, while providing top quality application performance.

Understanding How SD-WAN Works

Cloud first enterprises can provide top quality application quality of experience for its users using an SD-WAN. By identifying applications and through intelligence, SD-WAN Columbia SC offers application aware routine throughout the wide area network. Every type of application gets the right QoS as well as security policy enforcement, based on the business needs.

Top quality cloud performance is provided thanks to the secure local internet breakout of SaaS and IaaS application traffic from their branch while securing the business from threats. Compared to an SD-WAN, a traditional router-centric model provides the control function on all devices within the network and just routes traffic according to the TCP/IP addresses ACLs. However, this model is typically inefficient, rigid, and not cloud-friendly, which leads to a poor user experience.

Call SpartanTec, Inc. now and let our team of IT experts help protect your business against online threats while making sure that your network continuous to work efficiently.

SpartanTec, Inc.
Columbia, SC 29201
(803) 408-7166
http://manageditservicescolumbia.com/

Serving: Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Columbia, Wilmington, Fayetteville, Florence