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Network Consolidation as a Cost-Saving Tool:

Next-gen Technologies and the Role of SD-WAN

Network is the foundation of all virtual business activities, especially for organizations that have shifted from on-premise infrastructure to cloud-oriented platforms. Network performance plays a critical role in undermining a business’s ability to connect to decentralized workforces using cloud applications.

Most organizations have hundreds of individual networks, which reflects the number and breadth of the vastness. However, a high number of individual networks increases the complexity of administrative tasks like monitoring, maintenance, and configuration. Avoiding bottlenecks becomes challenging, and resource allocation becomes a problem as well.

That’s why most organizations are moving toward network consolidation. Network consolidation combines multiple individual networks into a unified and centralized infrastructure. It empowers organizations to run their data centers effectively as the number of PCIe ports, switch ports, and cables reduces. The Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) port is a serial expansion bus standard that is required for network communication, connecting one computer to one or more peripheral systems.

Are you still wondering whether network consolidation brings financial benefits to your organization? This blog will help you understand. We will also explore how SD-WAN plays a crucial role.

 

How Network Consolidation Brings Financial Advantages? 

There are three things that network consolidation does: 

Packets on an IP network arrive out of order and occasionally go missing and organizations usually have to retransmit the packets. Consolidated networks ensure that packets do not go missing. That’s why, network consolidation can provide to be highly beneficial for workloads that require extreme reliability, like hyperscale cloud computing environments.
Overall, the main point is that a number of individual networks increase complexity, and simplifying the network by introducing network consolidation can lead to savings in operational costs.

How Network Consolidation Helped a Furniture Retailer Accelerate Scaling Across the US?

Living Spaces is a prominent furniture retailer across the US. Their store locations consist of large showrooms where customers can view indoor and outdoor furniture. The store locations also have large warehouses for storing inventory.
All these locations depended upon network infrastructure to serve customers with responsive shopping experiences. As time passed, their business started to expand, and soon, Living Spaces opened its stores in Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and others. Their out-of-the-band infrastructure became incredibly complex, and it required dedicated cellular and out-of-band devices at each location.

However, network consolidation proved to be a better solution for eliminating the need for $300,000/year in SIM contracts. It centralized the management and minimized the number of entry points, reducing workloads and risks. Besides, the automation also helped them accelerate deployment.
This case study highlights the cost-saving effect of network consolidation. Network consolidation is becoming a foundational basis for modern workplaces to ensure smooth functioning while spending little on network services.

Four Ways SD-WAN Improves Network Performance 

Here are four primary ways that SD-WAN improves network performance: 

Efficient Bandwidth Utilization
SD-WAN can efficiently use multiple types of network connections, like broadband, Internet, cellular network, MPLS, and satellite, to optimize the bandwidth and intelligently route the traffic. It is the software-based intelligence that dynamically tracks application and network characteristics to move traffic over the optimal connection.
Sometimes, SD-WAN combines two networks simultaneously to aggregate bandwidth and improve the throughput of extremely large files and applications. It also makes it easier to conduct load balancing across multiple links with a backup to the secondary link in case a single link fails.
Application Optimization

In traditional WAN infrastructure, network traffic from remote areas is backhauled to the corporate data center for security inspection. Inspection is essential before being forwarded across the Internet. Then, network responses flow back from the data center to the remote user.

This is all fine if there are limited branches. However, when the number of branches increases, it can create intolerable latency issues for a large number of remote users relying on cloud applications.

However, with SD-WAN, there won’t be a problem related to backhauling. SD-WAN eliminates it due to direct cloud connectivity and delivers immediate app performance. Application-aware routing further enhances performance by ensuring that latency-sensitive applications are prioritized. It utilizes compression and caching techniques to reduce the amount of data that needs to be transmitted, improving the application response time.

Intelligent Traffic Steering

SD-WAN identifies and prioritizes different types of network traffic and routes them over the required network connection. This ensures that critical applications get the required network resources to function properly, even during peak usage. The technology monitors network conditions and routes the traffic automatically to the most efficient path, reducing latency and other issues.

For instance, SD-WAN identifies the bandwidth requirement of video conferencing and team collaboration applications and less-important apps to allocate the resources accordingly.

Increased Visibility

SD-WAN supports a centralized management platform for monitoring and collaborating traffic flows across the network, which improves visibility. Your team of network administrators can view real-time network statistics and are equipped to make well-informed decisions related to network configuration and optimization.

Besides, SD-WAN provides analytics and reports on network performance, allowing your team to identify the patterns and plan for future network growth.

Different Ways in Which SD-WAN Caters to Financial Benefits 

Besides improving the network performance and catering to boosted productivity and streamlined operations, SD-WAN can increase the ROI in the following ways as well: 

  • SD-WAN can eliminate the costs associated with MPLS circuits.
  • It enables a network architecture where the end users can easily access the cloud-based applications to fulfill their jobs.
  • Network degradation and underperforming applications can affect productivity when an organization cannot complete a transaction, or the transaction is processed slowly. You can say goodbye to all these problems because SD-WAN ensures this doesn’t happen.
  • The centralized management of SD-WAN allows IT teams to easily push new software releases, features, upgrades, and changes to every device and every network at once. This leads to operational cost savings, and new features can help you easily increase profits.

The Bottom Line,

Network consolidation brings individual networks together and simplifies the network connections, boosting efficiency and reducing bottlenecks. SD-WAN is a critical factor that can assist in network consolidation and reduce operational costs directly (lowering the requirement of hardware devices) and indirectly (intelligent traffic diversion and optimized resource allocation). 

If you are an organization deciding to implement SD-WAN to aggregate your distributed network, then you can consider CelerityX’s SD-WAN solutions. For instance, NetX is a revolutionary enterprise-grade network solution that breaks you free from the chains of networks. It offers unmatched reliability, security, performance, and security. Visit the website today to learn more about CelerityX’s SD-WAN solution and tap into the operational cost savings and boosted performance.Â