Solving Digital Transformation and Globalization Challenges With SD-WAN

IDC estimates that in 2020, over 40 percent of all technology spending will be slated toward digital transformation (DX) initiatives, and a recent Tech Pro Research survey found that 70 percent of firms have or are working on implementing DX strategies. Many of these projects offer the promise of expanded globalization, cloud adoption, greater business agility and higher performance to improve productivity and user experience (UX).

Unfortunately, IDC also discovered that 70 percent of DX initiatives fail, often due to roadblocks related to balancing global information access and security against frictionless UX.

The average enterprise has a distributed workforce and working remotely has grown by 91 percent over the last decade. Global business IP WAN traffic bandwidth consumption will double within the next few years, but external customers and internal employees will still expect instant and seamless access to information anytime, anywhere and from any device they're using. 

The WAN and the change it brings

These devices access information via networks that are becoming more complex and insecure as cloud and mobile usage expands. To instantly exchange this information for collaboration and operations, global organizations rely on wide area networks (WANs) to interconnect geographically dispersed locations.

Legacy architectures use a hub-and-spoke approach that relies on slow and expensive Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) connectivity that degrades UX and debilitates DX. User friction escalates when traffic must flow through the WAN and a security stack before reaching an application. Accessing critical information via cloud applications becomes "two cups of coffee" slow. Productivity suffers, projects are delayed and users grumble when corporate WANs are slower and less reliable than home-based Wi-Fi.

Traditional WANs use expensive routers to interconnect networks, which suffer from a lack of centralized management, troubleshooting complexities and limited scalability. This approach also creates multiple challenges for DX initiatives including increased bandwidth consumption when deploying cloud applications, degraded application performance that impacts UX and a lack of continued connectivity that can compromise failover and redundancy.

Why you should be looking to SD-WAN

SD-WAN solves these problems by offering next-generation capabilities to leverage an existing corporate WAN, as well as multicloud connectivity. A properly implemented SD-WAN can deliver high-speed application performance between branch sites and provide centralized and simplified control to determine optimal traffic paths.

We recommend exploring the right type of SD-WAN, which can allow you to move past antiquated MPLS services and empower direct internet access. An SD-WAN solution connects users to any application wherever it resides, from your data center to the cloud. It intelligently determines the most efficient and highest performance path for each application based on application service level agreements (SLAs) that can be configured with defined thresholds. 

Traditional WAN architectures can only route everything through MPLS. A properly implemented SD-WAN solution can help you enjoy the benefits of Software as a Service (SaaS), public cloud apps and unified communications while improving UX performance, ensuring DX agility and lowering total cost of ownership (TCO) for global expansion.

For best practice SD-WAN implementation, WWT has found Fortinet to be a scalable and integrated choice. Rather than only providing one piece of the SD-WAN puzzle, Fortinet offers a complete picture that integrates best-of-breed SD-WAN and security capabilities into a single multi-path solution; secures virtual private networks (VPNs)/overlays to encrypt data on any WAN carrier. Gartner rated Fortinet as having the highest ability to execute in the 2019 Magic Quadrant, and NSS Labs validated an order of magnitude lower TCO against most other solutions.

We can help you properly implement a secure Fortinet SD-WAN solution to ensure robust threat prevention, higher-performance and lower complexity and TCO. The Fortinet SD-WAN can help you deliver an application-aware automated WAN path controller with transparent visibility, superior network security and simplified management that extends to the edge of the network and beyond.

Conclusion

Global organizations using traditional WANs to connect remote locations risk increased delays, workloads and costs related to a lack of centralized management, troubleshooting complexities and limited scalability. They're also prone to DX failures and UX frustration due to low and slow remote network performance. 

Finally, protecting valuable corporate assets requires ultra-high cybersecurity. The Fortinet SD-WAN solution, implemented by WWT, eliminates expensive MPLS solutions, enables direct internet access to improve cloud application performance, integrates next-generation firewall (NGFW) security and offers network application awareness that dynamically selects optimal WAN routing.

WWT is a Fortinet Authorized Platinum Partner that uses a proven and innovative approach to help our customers discover, evaluate, architect and implement advanced technology. We take an integrated approach to security rather than focusing on point solutions. This helps us align business goals and objectives to technical solutions, providing more effective outcomes and solutions that further the development of an enterprise architecture. 

Learn more about how we can integrate and deploy Fortinet solutions to help you reduce vulnerabilities, which can set the stage for future innovation.