Five compelling SD-WAN use cases you need to know
Retail, financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, and professional services: what SD-WAN actually changes in each.
We discussed planning and deploying an SD-WAN solution in part three of our SD-WAN mini-series. When explaining who could use the technology, we touched on a few potential applications. Here are five of those use cases in greater depth, showing the real value SD-WAN provides.
Retail: optimized multi-location connectivity
Calling the retail landscape challenging would be putting it lightly. Modern retail chains no longer operate solely out of brick-and-mortar outlets but also increasingly rely on virtual storefronts. That means ensuring a frictionless shopping experience across all online and offline locations to discourage prospective customers from shopping with a competitor. Tight profit margins and huge fluctuations in demand during seasonal holidays add even more roadblocks.
SD-WAN connects store locations, data centers, distribution centers, and warehouses through a virtual network with centralized management and policy enforcement. Through intelligent traffic routing and resource scaling, administrators can manage traffic during peak shopping periods, avoiding slowdowns, shutdowns, and lost sales. It also tends to be more cost-effective than traditional options, allowing retailers to support an omnichannel experience without breaking their budgets.
Financial services: enhanced security across multiple branches
Finance is one of the most heavily regulated industries, and each jurisdiction has its own strict requirements for data and network security. Banks need to ensure consistent connectivity and service levels across multiple branches while also supporting an extremely high level of security.
SD-WAN fulfills this need, especially when augmented by artificial intelligence or deployed as part of SASE. Sensitive financial information is conveyed exclusively through an encrypted virtual network under the full control of administrators. That network can link everything from ATM networks to branch offices and data centers, allowing data to be shared freely without sacrificing security.
Manufacturing: supporting Industry 4.0 and beyond
From a networking standpoint, modern factories are extremely complex, blending countless connected endpoints and sensors with legacy systems. Managing even a single facility can be challenging. Connecting multiple geographically distributed facilities can be a logistical problem.
Using SD-WAN, network administrators can deploy a unified fabric that brings industrial IoT devices, traditional IT applications, and legacy operational technology onto the same network. In addition to seamless inter-site connectivity, it supports advanced monitoring and automation, and intelligent traffic prioritization ensures critical systems always receive the resources they need.
Healthcare: ensuring critical application performance
Network connectivity has the potential to revolutionize patient care, but there are growing pains healthcare organizations must overcome. Life-critical applications cannot experience downtime, and anything less than full connectivity is unacceptable. Security is also a concern: healthcare is among the most frequently targeted industries for cybercriminals, and organizations must adhere to extremely strict rules around storing and transferring sensitive information.
SD-WAN provides the right balance of security and reliability. A combination of intelligent prioritization and automated failover ensures that critical applications remain online, while extensive security controls keep the network compliant. It can also support advanced medical technologies while addressing the bandwidth challenges associated with transferring diagnostic data.
Professional services: supporting remote personnel
Professional services organizations must increasingly extend connectivity to remote staff, whether working from home or on site with a customer. VPNs are a temporary solution, offering neither the ease of use nor the bandwidth required for a modern distributed workforce.
SD-WAN delivers on performance and enables zero trust security. It allows an organization to extend remote connectivity to any site or device seamlessly while ensuring optimal performance through intelligent routing. Remote personnel have access to the same resources they would have at the office, with the same level of security, and the upfront capital investment required to expand to additional locations drops.
What we have compiled above is a small sample of the many potential applications. No matter your industry or use case, SD-WAN can change how you manage your network.
