Imagine this:
You’re hosting an online company-wide webinar. To prepare, you have several brainstorming sessions, spend hours discussing what you want to cover and stay up to the wee hours creating an awesome presentation. You are ready. You are going to rock.
You open the webinar and attendees start rolling in. Colleagues are excited and ready to see what you have.
The webinar starts. Your introduction is great and the first comment pops up. Sweet! You are already engaging your audience!
Then you read the comment.
“I can’t hear you. The sound keeps going in and out.”
One of the most dreaded comments any webinar presenter can hear. More comments start popping up about bad connections, choppy sound and major delays. Needless to say it’s a rough beginning to your webinar.
You power through it and it was an OK session in the end, but it could have been great.
So what went wrong? The webinar software? Bad luck?
Network reliability redefined
Most likely it was your network connection. Even if your company has the fastest, most robust Internet connection available, when there is high traffic and bandwidth usage, any network can lower in quality. Maybe people were downloading huge files during your webinar. Maybe the network was experiencing performance degradation because of a brownout. Or maybe a large percentage of the company started using their VoIP phones at the exact same time (i.e.: to listen to your webinar).
Even if you have the highest performing voice and video unified communications solutions, you still have to have a reliable and consistent network to power those hosted solutions. After all, what’s the benefit of dialing in to hear an awesome webinar, only to run into connection issues because your network starts failing?
SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) technology is redefining the reliability of network performance, giving companies of all sizes assured quality of service (QoS) and the peace of mind to know that their business-critical traffic (like voice, video and virtual desktop apps) will always be top priority.
And it doesn’t matter what kind of connections you use. SD-WANs use multiple connection types — MPLS/Cable/DSL/Fiber/LTE [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][3G/4G] — to make the best use of Internet bandwidth, lets you configure which applications are critical for your business and will save your company money and resources.
Benefits of SD-WANs
Get the power to control and manage your networks so the applications and services you choose have top priority over any other Internet traffic:
Assure reliable network performance
Degraded communications performance reduces productivity to a crawl and drains IT resources as they work to troubleshoot network problems. SD-WANs provide reliable hosted unified communications application performance by auto-detecting the fastest network path to optimize connectivity and speed.
Simplify your network management
IT staff can monitor and control your WAN from a centralized cloud-based view, whether you have one, two, or hundreds of locations. The simplified configuration options of most SD-WAN admin portals give IT the visibility and flexibility they need, while still delivering increased capacity, automatic updates, and automatic (or custom) business policies.
Rapid branch deployment
Is yours a multi-branch company? Adding new locations is fast and easy with a streamlined SD-WAN deployment model, allowing you to mobilize new branches in minutes, minimize the need for IT staff and reduce costly on-premises hardware at each office.
Reduce your costs
An SD-WAN can contribute to significant cost savings by optimizing lower cost broadband Internet, allowing most companies to scale back the use of multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) and other traditional circuits.
Increase your network security
SD-WANs continuously monitor and measure network traffic, giving your IT department deep visibility into your WAN and allowing them to quickly pinpoint a security attack. And with less hardware to take care of and no manual configurations that could put it at risk, SD-WANs offer more secured home and branch networks.
Pair high-performance cloud-based UC applications with the highest performing networking solution for a consistent and reliable communications experience.
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