Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses have changed how they run their day-to-day operations. Many companies are now driving voice, video, and data through the public internet to reach their remote employees. Businesses need the right communications infrastructure that allows work from home users to connect with their data and actively participate in video-based meetings and collaboration sessions. While Unified Communications platforms and services provide support for these crucial activities, the service’s effectiveness is only as good as the underlying connection. With the sudden shift to the remote working setup, WFH employees are experiencing a wide range of experiences, and many of them are not acceptable.
How can businesses and enterprises, schools, and universities – provide the right connectivity level that keeps employees and students productive?
Let’s explore three challenges that SD-WAN overcomes by delivering scalable and reliable network capacity using broadband connections and legacy circuits.
- Ensuring the Right User Experience
During their responses to the pandemic, business IT teams proved that running voice, video, and data across the public internet for most of their workforce could be problematic. While home-based broadband is sufficient for, well, home applications, it is not the best option for supporting the quality of voice and video communications that the office environment and classroom provide. The public internet does not enforce any traffic prioritization, which means that latency-sensitive voice and video communications suffer when any point on the internet encounters congestion. The appropriate SD-WAN solution can create the connectivity that assures UC users’ meetings do not have people saying, “sorry, can you please repeat that?”
- Managing Bandwidth at the Edge
The teleworker’s connectivity requires the right level of bandwidth that exceeds what homes typically have from their ISPs. While voice over IP requires about 100kbps per call, high-definition video can generate bandwidth requirements as high as 900Mbps. Fortunately, UC’s video requirements are not that high – the platform optimizes the video streams to the point that a single user only needs about 2 Mbps. But when you have a house full of users, all are vying for the same amount of fixed bandwidth. These remote workers need the right amounts of bandwidth provided to an edge device that can identify traffic types and prioritize application data over the broadband link. With centralized, cloud-controlled connectivity management, SD-WAN can aggregate links from multiple broadband providers, even wireless broadband and MPLS circuits, to meet the edge location’s connectivity needs.
- Keeping Data Communications Private
Business and enterprise home users may be connecting to their office centers and cloud-hosted applications, introducing opportunities for security breaches. These users often unknowingly send voice, video, and other private corporate data to colleagues using the public internet, which does not provide any protection from prying eyes. A data security breach is at or near the top of every CIOs list of worst nightmares. With the remote workforce, unsecured conversations and video sessions can expose sensitive data to thieves. SD-WAN solutions can provide inherent endpoint-to-endpoint privacy using encryption-based communications that prevent data thieves from viewing private information.
Adaptiv Solves the Challenges of the Remote Workforce
SD-WAN solutions powered by Adaptiv Networks solve all these challenges. We support a frictionless deployment that connects remote workers hosted on any ISP and connection type with the business’s public or private-cloud hosted services. Leveraging a portfolio of solutions that scale and provide optimal routing capabilities, Adaptiv Networks is helping companies solve demanding remote work conditions.
Are you wondering if your connectivity is efficiently meeting your business needs?
Watch our on-demand virtual conference, Business & Cloud Connectivity in a (Post?) Pandemic Era to learn more about this common challenge and how to solve it.
Contact the Adaptiv team today to find out how you can integrate our cutting-edge networking technology into your home office operation.
Glen is a successful sales leader in cyber security, mobile and networking with an extensive track record selling technology solutions to service providers, OEMS and enterprise, globally. As an open networks expert with very strong technical acumen, Glen is adept at working with new technologies and business models to help ensure success for partners and customers.