Frost & Sullivan : COVID-19 Highlights the Business Case for Extending SD-WAN to Remote Workers

Remote working or Work-From-Home (WFH) has been a growing trend in the past decade. While the tech industry has led the way for embracing part-time and full-time remote working, a wide range of businesses that rely on knowledge workers has adopted remote working for flexibility, productivity and harnessing the best talent from across the world. The COVID-19 pandemic that has forced governments across the globe to order citizens to stay at home and follow physical isolation further highlighting the benefits of remote working. Thanks to cloud and advances in networking technology, much of the global workforce (wherever applicable) is able to continue doing its work from a remote site.

However, as remote workers compete for bandwidth with kids attending virtual classrooms and others at home trying to stream entertainment videos, optimizing and prioritizing business applications on home networks has become critical during the current crisis. Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) technology is helping businesses optimize their branch site connectivity. SD-WAN solutions leverage real-time performance monitoring of transport networks to make application-aware, policy-based network link selection and steer traffic over the best available link. In scenarios that rely on a single network link and where sufficient bandwidth is not available to support all applications, SD-WAN technology optimizes the available bandwidth.