Close
Work from home, or WFH, was once optional. Today, however, it is a necessity and is going to be the new normal post the COVID-19 pandemic. And why not? Companies are experiencing hassle-free employee management, a reduction in utilities and overhead expenses, and equal or improved productivity. Work from home is a win-win situation for both the company and its employees.
Implementing an organization-wide work from home model, however, requires more thought and preparation for maximum efficiency. There are some obvious drawbacks to working remotely, especially network-related – some meetings get delayed because an employee has poor network, an employee’s message does not get across because of choppy video or audio, a presentation cannot progress because the shared screen has frozen, etc.
If any of these scenarios happened within the office spaces, the IT team would scramble to fix network issues. So, along the same lines, it’s time companies considered their employees’ homes as an extended office and implemented modern solutions for uninterrupted connectivity, seamless application performance, and optimal productivity.
Enterprises today have solution in place, wherein an employee working from home connects to the corporate network via solutions like VPN. An employee, working from home, could experience network disruption due to a number of reasons – an issue on the ISP’s end, multiple apps sharing the network bandwidth, multiple devices sharing the network bandwidth, etc.
And these network problems are not limited to communication to the corporate networks and applications. They also extend to connections made from a personal network to the cloud, either to enterprise-hosted applications on the cloud (like AWS) or to 3rd-party SaaS products (like Salesforce) used for day-to-day operations.
Another major concern is security. Employees connecting to the enterprise network and to sensitive information from a publicly exposed home network gives rise to a plethora of vulnerabilities.
Detecting the root cause for any of these issues is extremely hard for the IT department because, with home broadband and home networking device, the IT team has no access to monitor and manage centrally, they have no information about the bandwidth used, network traffic, applications being used, etc.
Implementing a Wide Area Network (WAN) to extend the enterprise network was the preferred method for organizations in the past, but it isn’t economically viable or efficient anymore. Traditional WAN comes with its own set of drawbacks –
Enterprises today have solution in place, wherein an employee working from home connects to the corporate network via solutions like VPN. An employee, working from home, could experience network disruption due to a number of reasons – an issue on the ISP’s end, multiple apps sharing the network bandwidth, multiple devices sharing the network bandwidth, etc.
And these network problems are not limited to communication to the corporate networks and applications. They also extend to connections made from a personal network to the cloud, either to enterprise-hosted applications on the cloud (like AWS) or to 3rd-party SaaS products (like Salesforce) used for day-to-day operations.
Another major concern is security. Employees connecting to the enterprise network and to sensitive information from a publicly exposed home network gives rise to a plethora of vulnerabilities.
Detecting the root cause for any of these issues is extremely hard for the IT department because, with home broadband and home networking device, the IT team has no access to monitor and manage centrally, they have no information about the bandwidth used, network traffic, applications being used, etc.
Implementing a Wide Area Network (WAN) to extend the enterprise network was the preferred method for organizations in the past, but it isn’t economically viable or efficient anymore. Traditional WAN comes with its own set of drawbacks –
With work from home becoming a norm, enterprises need a network solution that helps maintain security, provides seamless connectivity, and is dynamic so as to save costs. Most importantly, it should provide a way for employees working from home to access cloud applications more efficiently.
In a traditional WAN setup, all control functions are distributed to all of the routers that route traffic based on addresses. An SD-WAN (Software-Defined Networking in a Wide Area Network) is application-aware and uses software to intelligently route traffic across the WAN based on policies as required by business. These requirements could be the performance of the app, security policies, priority, etc.
Most importantly, it uses the internet as a safe and reliable form of data routing, allowing an organization to put in place a SD-WAN network that communicates over the public internet (rather than leased lines), which significantly lowers the cost.
Here is why SD-WAN is the solution when it comes to WFH –
SD-WAN is an elegant and cost-effective solution for large and small organizations, especially with remote employees. Traditional WAN just does not cut it anymore, with the rising integration with cloud solutions. Thus, to sum it up, SD-WAN is the answer.
(Information Source: https://lavellenetworks.com)