WFH and SD-WAN: a match made in heaven

It’s no secret that the business world, along with the rest of society at large, has changed massively over the last few months. Aside from the staggering loss of life, Covid-19 has brought with it changes to virtually every one of our social interactions.

The most obvious of the affected business aspects for workers worldwide is, of course, the advent of working from home, or WFH. While millions of people were already in WFH situations, millions more have now joined their ranks, and not all businesses were prepared for it.

With rapid changes in WFH, a rapid response was equally vital

In April 2020, almost 50% of the UK was working from home, according to the Office for National Statistics. Home users and their networks, however, are not all well-equipped to deal with this new situation.

With children and other adults staying at home as well, the home bandwidth can easily become stretched. Business software, or applications being employed by businesses, have to work flawlessly, something which is not always possible with a home-based connection.

This is precisely where SD-WAN can help enterprises ensure their WFH staff remain supported.

SD-WAN can facilitate and promote WFH productivity

With remote working, prioritising business applications over recreational ones is vital. Joining a Zoom meeting only to struggle to say two words before being cut off due to a heavy load on the connection is not only frustrating but can also deteriorate business relationships.

SD-WAN can specifically target the areas in which WHF can suffer due to the nature of home connections. More precisely, it can prioritise business traffic over recreational traffic during business hours. This ensures members of the family working from home remain productive, at the expense of recreational or other use on the same home network.

As mentioned before, this is particularly important in communication applications such as Zoom or Skype. SD-WAN offers superior performance in such platforms so that remote workers do not have to be hindered at all when making use of them.

SD-WAN can also offer optimal connectivity to the cloud

With many of the applications that businesses use being based in the cloud, SD-WAN can provide home users with optimised connectivity to such platforms so that there is little difference in performance regardless of whether they are accessing said applications from the office or from home.

This can include technologies ranging from CRM & MiS platforms to marketing services and beyond. Aside from any issues that might arise from cloud software itself, SD-WAN technology can ensure stellar connectivity and performance to multiple cloud-based applications.

As such, those working from home can continue accessing business-critical assets and information and collaborate with their colleagues in real-time in any platform that their organisation has chosen to work with.

SD-WAN can provide huge benefits to remote workers

There are countless opportunities for SD-WAN to provide a seamless business experience to those working from home during this pandemic but also in the future, including in the event of any future lockdowns.

For example, if the enterprise is under contract for a managed SD-WAN solution, any connectivity issues to business platforms that a homeworker may experience could potentially be solved by an IT engineer instead of relying on the worker’s individual IT experience.

Remote working is increasingly becoming the “new normal”, with a return to the office seemingly more and more unlikely for staff on mass. SD-WAN’s core benefits, such as the ability to target specific cloud-based software for improved performance, make it an excellent consideration for business continuity in this new reality.