COVID-19 Highlights the Business Case for Extending SD-WAN to Remote Workers

The COVID-19 pandemic that has forced governments across the globe to order citizens to stay at home and follow physical isolation has further highlighted the benefits of remote working. Thanks to cloud and advances in networking technology, much of the global workforce (wherever applicable) is able to continue doing its work from a remote site. With businesses across industries embracing the public cloud to host key applications, and with advances in residential broadband and wireless speeds, remote workers can access most enterprise applications from home. However, as remote workers compete for bandwidth with kids attending virtual classrooms and others at home trying to stream entertainment videos, optimizing and prioritizing business applications on home networks has become critical during the current crisis.
Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) technology is helping businesses optimize their branch site connectivity. SD-WAN solutions leverage real-time performance monitoring of transport networks to make application-aware, policy-based network link selection and steer traffic over the best available link. In scenarios that rely on a single network link and where sufficient bandwidth is not available to support all applications, SD-WAN technology optimizes the available bandwidth by:
·     giving higher priority to business traffic compared to social media, YouTube, and Netflix traffic
·     continuously monitoring the traffic path for packet loss and delay, and applying forward error correction to reduce packet loss and increase throughput
·     using traffic-handling techniques to throttle less-critical application traffic
These advanced features ensure that the WAN is always available and delivers superior performance to support critical enterprise applications. With the rapid increase in remote workers, and the fact that these employees are accessing the same enterprise applications as office-based workers, there is an emerging business case to be made for extending SD-WAN deployments to include work-from-home employees.