How does the Government sector benefit from SD-WAN?
The widespread adoption of digitization has created the need for the government sector to optimize their network and application performance without investing all their time in managing their IT infrastructure. As we know, government establishments are spread across multiple offices or branch locations across the nation, which makes it difficult for traditional wide area networks (WANs) to keep up or cope with the latest trends and scale up to various locations. Instead of traditional WAN architectures, government sectors should venture into software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) architectures that centrally manage WAN traffic from the cloud or on-premises while ultimately ensuring greater security, resilience, and efficiency. Despite this, government sectors should know how SD-WAN solutions can enhance network management or make the most of SD-WAN. Below are three things every government sector should know about SD-WAN, whether local, state, or national.
SD-WAN Improves Operational Efficiency
By leveraging SD-WAN, government sectors can become more efficient in capital investment, employee productivity, and overall government operations and limit IT repair costs and other expenses associated with resolving operational issues such as lost data. For example, SD-WAN solutions can dynamically route traffic around and optimize bandwidth while ensuring seamless performance. Thus, employees will have access to mission-critical applications quickly and reliably, which leads to increased productivity and satisfaction. Besides that, the automated capabilities of SD-WAN, such as failover and analytics for application performance, can improve the IT department’s efficiency. Automating these processes frees up IT engineers time for other value-added tasks, like implementing more robust data recovery and storage solutions for government organisations digitising their services.
SD-WAN Improves Security and Compliance
Government sectors need to consider cybersecurity and compliance when dealing with IT, given their sensitive information. Fortunately, SD-WAN provides IT teams with greater control over improving security and compliance. For example, SD-WAN is equipped with security tools, such as intrusion detection and URL filtering, so malicious traffic cannot enter government networks. Additionally, IT teams can centrally manage security policies for segmenting traffic and authenticating devices so that unauthorized users or cyber criminals have less chance of accessing sensitive areas of your network. Besides preventing external threats, SD-WAN can also help with compliance and security within an organization. For instance, Government employees may not want to visit certain websites or use applications that may pose security risks or cause compliance problems whereby SD-WAN can be used to set policies so users cannot access risky web areas, as well as to ensure that network traffic is appropriate for a government workplace with features such as safe search and YouTube filtering.
Save money with SD-WAN’s resiliency.
To meet strict budget requirements, government sectors should take IT costs seriously. When implementing an SD-WAN solution, it is critical to consider the total cost of ownership. An SD-WAN solution that is reliable can save you money in the long run. The reason for this is that SD-WAN can minimize network fix costs due to its resilience and redundancy, especially on the connectivity links, as it can leverage multiple WAN links such as MPLS, Broadband, and Wireless 4G/5G connectivity simultaneously. Besides that, data loss could result from a network outage, and recovery could be time-consuming and costly, especially if employees need to work overtime or contractors have to be brought in. SD-WAN solutions offer application load sharing and link balancing to keep your network running smoothly and prevent network overload. In addition, automated link failover can protect against outages.
