Digital Transformation And SDWAN Are A Perfect Partnership…Here’s How

 

The evolution of SD-WAN is changing the way businesses approach networking—are you keeping up?

As digital transformation continues to accelerate, the latest advancements in SD-WAN are making networks more agile, secure, and efficient. With cloud-first strategies becoming the norm, traditional networks are no longer cutting it. SD-WAN’s ability to intelligently route traffic, enhance security, and optimize performance is reshaping the landscape for businesses across industries.

What’s driving this evolution? Enterprises are increasingly embracing hybrid work models, cloud apps, and IoT devices—all demanding faster, more reliable, and secure connections. SD-WAN is stepping in to address these needs with advanced features like zero-trust security, AI-driven traffic optimization, and seamless integration with multi-cloud environments.

Read this article for a deep dive into how and why SDWAN and digital transformation strategies are a perfect partnership.

Digital Transformation And SDWAN Are A Perfect Partnership…Here’s How

How SDWAN Is Like Smart GPS For Wide Area Networks

 

Do you remember the days before you had a smartphone and you wanted to get somewhere you had never been? Did you pull out the Thomas Brothers map book, look up the address in the back and then find the page and quadrants to find your street? Then you had to backtrack to your location to figure out how to get there. And traffic? You had to listen to the AM station that had “traffic on the sixes.” Want to go back there?

Well in the old days, the way we routed network traffic was about as antiquated. Let’s compare this natural progression of finding your way from point A to point B using network equipment. The days of physical maps – the “Thomas Brothers” is like a basic router. This “physical map” showed you all paths leaving it up to you to figure out the best way there. Then we were introduced to MapQuest. This let us look up the address where we wanted to go, and it gave us a map and printed directs how to get there from our location. Let’s compare that to fail over routers. These used non-real-time path information to get you there using the shortest path.

The Aha Moment

Today we have a computer in our pocket to help us get where we want to go using the fastest route. Google Maps or Waze use real-time data and information from actual drivers to get you there faster and smarter. Today’s SDWAN Technology does this for the network. Traffic can be prioritized, and the technology know what to get there first.

Traditional network devices cannot detect all network conditions on every hop between A & B. Anomalies like network stability, small packet loss, jitter, latency, etc. cannot be detected in real time. Therefore, services like voice & video (without SDWAN) can have quality issues, even with the best bandwidth.

Today’s network monitoring is not real-time, it is near real time, which leaves significant gaps in visibility/information such as traffic bursts and other anomalies. SDWAN helps companies by combining real-time granular advanced end-to-end network metrics/information with real-time wire speed per-packet and per session routing decisions at each edge.

SDWAN combines navigation smarts with actual routing ability with easy management, automation, and visibility into all locations giving companies an amazing solution that merely saves time, money, and effort. SDWAN is an easy-to-use toolset that can be configured in many ways. SDWAN fixes the problem of the edge management and lack of onsite IT. SDWAN automates many of the once manual tasks of programming, provisioning and routing decisions with degraded internet connections.

There’s Free Help Available To You For Selecting the Right Equipment

SDWAN is a broad technology and can get confusing but fear not. All SDWAN manufacturers are purpose-build for specific client use cases. Some are built to help prioritize and control cloud connectivity and applications that run the business, others are built for network resiliency and reliability, while still others are built to collapse environments using an all-in-one cloud firewall solutions. All SDWAN manufacturers are great; it just all depends on what you are trying to accomplish not only today but three years from now. By approaching SDWAN from a consultative and high-level, goal-oriented approach can bring you an extreme amount of long-term value and savings.

As far as pricing, it is very dependent on size and speeds required; it can run anywhere from $55 per month per location to $2k per month per location depending on your specific needs. These solutions can also be Managed, Co-Managed or do-it-yourself installations. In some cases, SDWAN can even save you money by offsetting high-cost equipment and networking services.

 Here are just a few of the SDWAN providers that we have access to:

Aryaka, Airspring, BCM One, Convergia, Cox, GTT, Lightpath, Lumen, Ooma, TPx, Zayo, Silverpeak, Cato Networks, Cisco VIPtela, Cisco Meraki MX, Citrix , CloudGenix, Barracuda Networks, BigLeaf Networks, Ecessa, Riverbed, SimpleWAN, TeloIP, Versa Networks, VeloCloud, And MANY More.

By scheduling a discovery call with us and one of our engineers, we can determine a solution that fits best for your specific use case from simple failover to global designs.

All it takes is to ask us at the below link….it’s as easy as 1, 2, 3. Plus our service is FREE.

Free SDWAN Network Design Support

How To Choose A Network Service Provider

 

Finding the right network service provider can be challenging, time-consuming, and even a little bit scary. Here's some timely advice in this article.

How To Choose A Network Service Provider

For FREE help sourcing the best fit provider(s) for your network strategy and design efforts (including network security) simply tell us what you need at the link below and we'll take it from there.

FREE Network Sourcing And Design

Whatever the need is.... just ask us. We'll do the rest.

Carriers vs. Aggregators: How To Select The Optimal Mix Of Network Transport Providers

 

Best practices for network transport (LAN/WAN/WLAN/SDWAN) call for companies to work with multiple suppliers to get competitive prices, maximize service coverage, and secure better service delivery performance. But which suppliers should an enterprise select? How do you figure out the best fit for an enterprise’s needs, and what are some of the challenges and gotchas of a multi-supplier portfolio approach?

How To Select The Optimal Mix Of Network Transport Providers

n addition to the timely insights provided in this article...you're strongly encouraged to take advantage of the FREE sourcing and custom network design support available at the below link. Of particular note is that they guarantee a lower price from the 100s of suppliers cited than you would get if you went to the same suppliers yourself.

FREE Sourcing And Custom Network Design

Buyer’s Guide - Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) And Secure Service Edge (SSE)

 

SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) rolls networking and security into a cloud service, making it easier for enterprises to provide simple, secure access to corporate resources. Many vendors offer SASE services, but what they actually provide and how they provide it varies widely.

A recent Gartner survey of CISOs revealed that “a majority of buyers are planning for a two-vendor strategy for SASE,” with security and networking teams making separate buying decisions rather than opting for single-vendor SASE. In response to these realities, Gartner coined a new term, secure service edge (SSE), which is essentially SASE minus SDWAN (Software Define Wide Area Network), the network access part of the equation.

SASE And SSE Buyer's Guide

IN THIS BUYER’S GUIDE YOU'LL FIND...

* Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and Secure Service Edge (SSE) explained

* What to look for in SSE and SASE

* Leading vendors for SSE

* Leading vendors for SASE

* Full-stack SASE providers

* Partial-stack SASE vendors

* What to ask before buying SSE and SASE

* 10 questions to ask prospective SSE vendors

* 10 questions to ask prospective SASE vendors

For FREE help designing a custom SDWAN ecosystem, including addressing SASE and/or SSE options, simply ask us at Customized SDWAN Strategy

Everything EVERY Business Should Know About Network Connectivity And SDWAN

In the current world of Digital Transformation, Industry 4.0, and the new normal of work from home/work from anywhere .... network connectivity and Software Defined Wide Area Networks (SDWAN) have emerged as the critical pieces enabling successful implementation of IoT, edge computing, and unified communications applications enterprise wide. Rather than jumping in blindly, here's everything EVERY business should know first.

THE EVOLUTION OF ACCESS

We live in an ever-increasing world; IoT devices are making the need for bandwidth and cloud computing on the edge. Today we will talk about the network itself and cloud connectivity. The network is the foundation of everything that is done. Everything that we access in the cloud has to get there through the internet. Internet access is the key, the foundation to the entire model.  SD-WAN is the “shock-absorbing” layer that sits in between the raw network and the cloud where applications live. At the very top of the pyramid is where you have your applications such as UCaaS and CCaaS; this is what allows clouds to talk to one another. Finally, the entire pyramid is your security layer, which is what protects the entire structure.

There are different principal and ancillary components when it comes to internet access, these include:

Principle Components

• Cable
• DSL
• Best-Effort Fiber
• Fixed 4G/5G
• Fixed Satellite
• Fixed Microwave
• Dedicated Fiber

Ancillary Components

• Auto-Failover
• WiFi Hotspots
• Cloud Connect

Cable and Best-Effort Fiber are the two main methods of getting to the cloud at a very cheap rate. Cable itself started a long time ago, at the beginning all the bandwidth was dedicated to the TV signal, but thanks to the innovation of turning TV signals into IP, an enormous amount of bandwidth has been freed up. Today while the price per meg keeps deteriorating, the amount of bandwidth that the cable companies can provide is skyrocketing thanks to DOCSIS 3.1, changing the way businesses use the cloud.

Just because there is a lot of throughput on a coax line, it doesn’t mean all the packets arrive quickly, nor does it mean that all the packets will arrive at all. It’s still an over-subscribed, best-effort, non-SLA service. Applications like voice and video are incredibly sensitive to latency and packet loss and always will be.

SD-WAN provides the opportunity to clean up packet loss and latency. SD-WAN uses redundancy and error-correction to restore packets that could be lost, and it finds quicker paths to the cloud (like WAZE) when it needs to. There is no static routing cable “telling” the router what to do – it’s making decisions on its own to protect the outcome, which is near 100% data transmission with minimal latency.

PROVIDERS FREEDOMFIRE COMMUNICATIONS WORKS WITH

So, what cable providers does FreedomFire Communications work with?

When you are talking about cable, make sure you don’t sleep on the add-ons. You must make sure that you aren’t just talking about bandwidth. A lot of providers have some extremely innovative products.

The FreedomFire Communications best-effort providers include:

FreedomFire Communications has also excelled in the dedicated fiber provider area. If you want to find out if there’s a dedicated fiber provider in your area, you can always just ask FreedomFire Communications. We have patented tools which shows us what is where and offered by whom.

We also work with international dedicated fiber providers:

Wireless Internet Access providers include:

SD-WAN PROVIDERS

When it comes to SD-WAN, FreedomFire Communications works with multiple providers.

So, what are the key drivers of an SD-WAN design?

1. Cost – How does the customer get the speed and reliability without overpaying?
2. Management Complexity – Customer’s ability to self-manage a network
3. Functionality – What abilities does the overlay (AKA, aggregate) network need to have?
4. Quality – Are there any applications that are sensitive to delay, packet loss, and jitter?
5. Security – If the customer is securing the WAN at the edge, do they want to do it with a standard edge firewall appliance, or do they want to simplify down into one SD-WAN box?

To learn more about all your options for network connectivity and SDWAN, including free assistance with network design and security, simply ask us at FreedomFire Communications.