Secure Networking

Flexibility, visibility and control for your network.

Understanding SD-WAN

SD-WAN is a software-defined approach to managing the wide-area network.

In the past, a regular Wide Area Network (WAN) would be used to connect branch offices to a central corporate network, or to connect to remote data centres. These WAN connections would often rely on special proprietary hardware to function and operate. SD-WANs take advantage of the internet or cloud-computing, and provides a software-based interface to monitor and manage the regular WAN functions

Why does your business need SD-WAN?

Legacy Wide Area WANs are no longer an effective solution as an increasingly overwhelming volume of data is funnelled down an already overloaded MPLS network.

Ultimately, SD-WAN offers greater flexibility, visibility and control over your network while lowering costs and, most importantly, ensuring that your WAN is future-proofed and cloud ready.

Your network is working harder than ever before

  • Explosive growth in real-time applications
  • Distributed workforces
  • The exponential growth of cloud computing
Can your infrastructure keep up?
The problem is that these trends combine to make network management more complex and challenging than ever before.

Quite simply, WANs are outdated. Without a reliable network infrastructure, your company’s productivity is at risk .That’s where SD-WAN comes in.

Against this backdrop, it’s easy to see why many organisations are turning to intelligent wide area networks and cloud access networks (like Microsoft virtual WAN), relying on the intelligence and automation that these networks deliver to ensure the continued availability of their applications.
SD-WAN is crucial to developing intelligent networks
Think of it as the next generation of WAN solutions, accelerating application services while promising fully integrated security to ensure your enterprise the ultimate user experience. We achieve this by leveraging the industry’s leading global SD-WAN platforms, so that your WAN is transformed by optimising MPLS, Internet or a hybrid WAN network.
We construct the network around your business’ needs
The network construct is driven by you and your business’ specific requirements around performance and reliability. Our SD-WAN Service Portfolio is transport-independent and can be delivered using a blend of multiple access technologies, including Ethernet, Internet, broadband, fixed wireless and 4G/LTE to create an aggregated networking solution that is best suited to your business. Alternatively, leverage your own network connectivity and simply utilise our managed SD-WAN services to manage the overlay, giving you flexibility as well as complete visibility and control of the network.
Our partnerships mean you get the best service, always
Our partnerships with ISPs and network providers across Africa ensure that we are able to deliver the very best combination of speed, resilience and performance at the best available price to each of your branch sites.

Business benefits of SD-WAN

  • Simplification: Because SD-WAN operates on software, it allows us to eliminate a lot of the devices and CPE’s that have always existed at the edge of the network adding cost and complexity to those infrastructures.
  • Speed: Gigabit speed on the last mile allows clients to move off lower speed legacy services like MPLS and eliminate bandwidth barriers at all their branch locations.
  • Flexible VPNs: SD-WAN allows you to bring VPNs between sites or VPNs between sites and datacentres. It also allows you to have application-specific control across your entire network or on a site-by-site basis.
  • Easier management: SD-WAN comes with software-based routers and firewalls which allow you to simplify your network management and allow you to have simple, consistent and streamlined execution of router and firewall policies across the network.
  • Flexibility
  • Agility: The rapid rollout of WAN services to remote offices without the need for on-site IT support. The bandwidth can easily be adjusted (increased or decreased) depending on business needs.
  • Visibility
  • Control
  • Bandwidth savings: Internet connections are readily available, quick to deploy, and comes at a much lower cost than equivalent MPLS networks. SD-WAN provides the reliability and security benefits of WAN services at “Internet prices”.
View SD-WAN branch structure

See SD-WAN in action

PPS, a South African financial and healthcare services company, were in the position of finding the best solution to replace its ageing, multi-tenanted, MPLS-based network. We implemented a best of breed, Citrix SD-WAN solution, in order to provide them with world class speed and unmatched reliability.

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