How SD-WAN can help you overcome remote work challenges

Published:
Categories: Connectivity

Are you working from home these days? You’re certainly not alone. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the world to a halt, forcing many employees into home offices. However, because the sudden change to remote work wasn’t carefully planned or organized in most cases, broadband connections are feeling the strain—even though they’re crucial to productivity and seamless communication.

While agile work may be more productive and cost-effective in theory, challenges like Quality of Service (QoS), security, interrupted network access, poor network performance, and congestion mitigations can cause unnecessary disruption. Home offices need robust, stable, and fast connections if they’re going to be effective and efficient in the long run.

But that’s not always an easy task when you take into account remote working cultures with multiple users and distributed applications in multi-cloud enterprises. Traditional appliance-based remote access solutions can’t offer the required scalability and application experience for global users and applications.

The main challenges enterprises are facing with remote work

As a result, remote users generally encounter the following challenges that can impact their productivity:

  • Poor user experience due to network issues and low-quality, consumer-grade hardware
  • Unreliable connectivity due to geographically distributed remote locations
  • Shared internet access that fails to differentiate between business and recreational traffic

And IT experts have their own difficulties: They face issues such as:

  • Scaling rollout and managing the onboarding of remote workers
  • Complexity and high cost of managing large deployments
  • Enabling security for users, data, applications, and networks

Solving work-from-home challenges with SD-WAN

It’s no longer enough to simply provide connectivity for your workforce. Enterprises need robust solutions that extend security features to remote employees, improve the user experience, and provide more detailed information about application performance and usage.

SD-WAN is an efficient solution that can help your enterprise create and connect flexible networks for your remote teams around the world. What’s more, it boasts many features to make your internal and external operations smoother.

Key benefits of SD-WAN for enterprises include:

  • Optimizing traffic flow and performance across various branches and home offices
  • Application-aware routing and traffic steering to prioritize business-critical applications
  • Smart traffic routing to cost-effective services while avoiding low-performance circuits
  • Prioritizing traffic to ensure a seamless experience for business-critical applications
  • Replacing traditional routers in branch offices with systems that assess and utilize various network transport technologies based on performance
  • Decreasing network complexity with easier configuration, one-touch deployment, continuous monitoring, and centralized issue resolution
  • Expense management using the cloud for connectivity and services
  • Delivering proper business agility
  • Maximizing appliance performance with secure access to enterprise applications
  • Providing greater flexibility than traditional WAN technologies
  • Comprehensive network insights into sites, devices, connections, packet loss, latency, jitter, and performance issues

How Telekom enables seamless remote work

Agile work is part of the new normal—and so is helping enterprises ensure business continuity and hire a skilled workforce without significant infrastructure investments. Managed SD-WAN services help you stay ahead of the curve with cutting-edge systems backed by recognized experts. Our SD-WAN solutions connect remote networks with corporate networks for greater security, faster network speeds, and seamless communication.

Would you like to find out more? Get in touch with our team right away! We’re always happy to help.