Cloud Solutions

Staying connected to your SaaS requires the right cloud connectivity

By / November 1, 2019

Centralized IT in a distributed world

In a cloud based world, connectivity has a symbiotic relationship with SaaS. That's why the right connection makes all the difference. Without the right connection, the negative business impact of connectivity downtime is at an all time high.

• 99% of businesses suffer business impact from network interruptions.
• 75% experience network interruptions several times a year or more frequently.
• 49% of companies require 3+ hours to resolve remote office network outages.
  *According to an August 2019 Dimensional Research survey.

Disruptions aren't exclusive to outages

One common cause of network disruption, is not a power outage, or provider downtime, it is directing traffic to the closest point of entry into cloud platforms. Taking a software based approach to connectivity provides more intelligent routing, and can eliminate many of these issues.

Software based connectivity can provide application driven, intelligent path selection, across WAN links based on policies centrally defined on the controller. For example, VoIP could route through a QoS enabled MPLS network, while G-Suite and Salesforce, run across a business cable connection. This allows the software to balance loads across the WAN connections, monitor application performance and send traffic over the lowest cost, or the most reliable WAN links, depending on application requirements.

Software based routing improves application performance

Software based connectivity (SD-WAN) is also effective in improving cloud-based application performance, including native cloud-based applications like G-Suite.

The software based nature of SD-WAN decouples the application from the underlying network transport. Doing this provides the ability to run any application over any transport or combination of transports. This could be MPLS, Cable, Fiber, LTE/5G, Fixed wireless and even satellite networks. This ability allows SD-WAN to connect branch offices and remote sites in a different way to the traditional hub and spoke model, typically by creating a Hybrid WAN - one that includes at least two WAN connections from each branch office, and leverages more than one network.


SaaS thrives on SD-WAN

Traditional WANs are unable to provide the agility to drive the improved performance and speed of change businesses require. SD-WAN solutions meet these challenges, creating better agile solutions, that can adapt quickly to meet the growing need for faster change, and cloud delivered applications.

Resources

Lamont, Calum. “How SD-WAN Can Help in Meeting Increasing Cloud-Based Demands.” Cloud Computing News, 30 July 2018, cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2018/jul/30/how-sd-wan-can-help-meeting-increasing-cloud-based-demands/.

Columbus, Louis. “Scaling Cloud Services Is Key To Growing A Digital Business.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 9 Oct. 2019, 10:38am EDT, www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2019/10/09/scaling-cloud-services-is-key-to-growing-a-digital-business/.