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As the reality of world-wide lockdowns and the move to home working took shape during COVID-19, businesses worked quickly to deliver their services digitally. Throughout 2020, the focus was not only on digital transformation, but on digital acceleration. Combined with globalisation and users demanding better digital experiences, businesses are looking to technology to drive agility, flexibility and cost efficiency.
From conferences and events shifting to webinar style formats to the uptake in cloud-based team collaboration applications, the widespread adoption of "cloud first" strategies signifies that the Internet is fast becoming the preferred method of managing communication across an organisation’s branch network.
This is why many corporations are looking to software-defined networking (SDN) solutions to create digital business platforms that offer flexibility, innovation and control. Businesses can optimise the variable connectivity, bandwidth, and security needs of cloud through solutions such as software-defined networking in a wide area network (SD-WAN).
SD-WAN empowers businesses to orchestrate a range of networking technologies, with easy deployment and central management, and the intelligence to automatically adjust traffic flows between multiple links for better Internet connectivity.
And, while it’s expected that 60 per cent of enterprises will have implemented SD-WAN by 2023, up from less than 20 per cent in 2019, it is not a one-size-fits-all solution and it comes with its share of complexity. As outlined in Telstra’s Ultimate SD-WAN Guide, there are a number of considerations to make to ensure your deployment is successful.