For years, connecting a branch office meant ordering a single fixed line and hoping nothing ever went wrong with it. If that line developed a fault, the site was effectively closed for business until an engineer could be booked, and in many parts of the country that could take days rather than hours. For a company running ten, twenty or a hundred locations, that way of working has become very difficult to justify.
SD-WAN changes the picture by treating every connection available to a site, including fibre, 4G, 5G and even satellite, as part of one intelligent network that is able to repair itself. In this blog we will look at what that means in practice, and why it is quickly becoming the default approach for multi-site businesses rather than an upgrade they consider later on.
What SD-WAN actually does
Rather than sending all traffic down one pipe and hoping for the best, an SD-WAN device continuously measures the health of every connection plugged into it. It watches packet loss, latency and jitter, and it steers each type of traffic over whichever path is performing best at that moment.
The important word there is continuously. A traditional failover arrangement only reacts once a line has failed completely, and by that point your card payments have already been declined and your voice calls have already dropped. SD-WAN responds to a connection that is degrading rather than waiting for one that is dead, so in most cases the people working at the site never notice that anything happened at all.
Why one connection is no longer enough
A branch today is doing considerably more than it was ten years ago. Card payments, stock and ordering systems, CCTV, voice, staff devices and guest wifi all share the same connection, and most of those systems are now hosted somewhere else rather than on a server in the back office. When the line goes down, all of it goes down together, and the site is left unable to trade.
There is also the question of lead times. Opening a new site often means waiting weeks for a fixed line to be installed, and that wait sits right on the critical path of the whole opening. Businesses that are growing quickly often find that their connectivity provider has become the thing holding them back.
Not all traffic needs the same thing
One of the more useful things SD-WAN brings is the ability to treat different applications differently. Card payments need reliability far more than they need raw speed. Voice and video calls need low latency and consistent jitter. A nightly backup, on the other hand, can quite happily use whatever capacity is left over once everything else has been served.
Application aware routing lets you set those priorities once and apply them across every site in the estate. Payments and voice can be kept on the most stable link, while bulk traffic uses the cheaper connection. If the stable link begins to degrade, the important traffic is the first thing to move.
Managing an estate rather than a collection of sites
Once a business is running more than a handful of locations, the day to day problem stops being any single connection and becomes visibility. Without a central view, head office only finds out about a problem when somebody at the site picks up the phone to report it.
Centralised management gives you every site in one dashboard, with policy pushed out from one place instead of being configured box by box. Routers can be pre-configured before they are shipped, so a new site is a matter of plugging the unit in and powering it on. For a rollout of any size, that is usually the difference between opening in days and opening in weeks.
Where Anvil fits in
Our SD-WAN Pro solution bonds up to twelve separate internet connections into a single resilient link, with a fixed public static IPv4 address and a real time management platform behind it. It can combine fixed line, 4G, 5G and satellite in whatever mix suits the site, which means a rural branch and a city centre branch can be brought onto the same standard without either of them compromising.
For any business running more than a few locations, SD-WAN is steadily becoming the sensible default rather than the optional extra. If you would like to talk through how it would work across your own sites, contact us below and a member of our team will be happy to help.
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