More than ever, businesses are looking for cost-effective and reliable ways to keep their distributed workforce connected. Whether working at home or in offices around the globe, traditional WAN paired with VPN just isn’t cutting it anymore. Cloud networking helps to overcome the most common issues related to accessibility, IT support requirements, and bandwidth, and it’s fast to install.
Let’s take a closer look at three of the biggest benefits offered by cloud networking when improving the performance of your organization online.
Bandwidth Optimization and Improved Performance
With advancements in software-based security applications, it is now possible to use broadband for your WAN, which can either supplement or even completely replace MPLS, leading to a significantly faster connection at a lower cost. Depending on whether you use a hybrid MPLS/SD-WAN segmented by application priority and security needs, or you shift entirely to the cloud, overall speed performance can be as much as 10x faster with lower costs. A recent IDC survey showed that nearly a quarter of businesses implementing cloud networking technology have seen cost savings of up to 39% while another 65% reporting savings of up to 20%.
Overall, businesses are able to seamlessly extend their WAN to multiple public clouds to increase cloud application and workload optimization — for remote workers, this means better performance and less slowdowns without sacrificing security.
Centralized management across branch networks
Instead of network specialists physically visiting branch locations to set up and maintain WAN infrastructure, the configuration is centralized, greatly reducing maintenance and operations costs. Zero-Touch Provisioning makes pushing configuration updates to all branches faster and easier. Not only does this support faster deployments in new locations, it allows for faster one-click pushes of new updates to all devices on the WAN.
In addition, organizations can transition technology platforms more easily, reducing the cost of professional services for implementation and supporting mixed technology ecosystems more seamlessly.
Improved security
Security is a greater concern than ever before, with 41% of companies reporting some kind of cybersecurity breach or attempt according to a recent IDG survey of US organizations.
Cloud networking enables you to centralize security upgrades and patching, automate security notifications, and quickly integrate new functionality to protect against cyberthreats. The result is much greater scalability, great transparency into your security protocols and effectiveness, and an increased return on investment from streamlining security applications.
There are some challenges, however. Avant’s survey found that 54% of customers entering a cloud networking conversation were unsure how to approach security. A big part of this is that each vendor has a different offering. While most cloud networking offerings include firewalls, application policy control, VLAN segmentation, and split tunneling, there are differences in how these features are implemented, how well the system integrates with existing tools, and more. It’s important to carefully evaluate the tool being used and the vendor you select to ensure you get the best match for your current security infrastructure.
Cloud networking is designed for the way businesses operate today, meaning a decreased need for single-point solutions, faster time to market when deploying new locations, increased visibility to support resource efficiency and consistency, and an overall decrease in cost for professional services related to implementation.
