Significant Cost Savings: SD-WAN can dramatically lower your networking costs by allowing you to replace or augment expensive MPLS circuits with affordable broadband. Industry research indicates businesses can save around 50% of WAN costs by adopting SD-WAN compared to traditional WAN infrastructure.

Instead of paying premium prices for private lines at every site, you can combine everyday internet connections to get the bandwidth and reliability you need at a fraction of the cost. And because SD-WAN intelligently manages these links, you achieve savings without compromising on performance or security.

With SD-WAN, your network becomes much more resilient to outages and congestion. The technology can use multiple active connections simultaneously and will automatically reroute traffic if one link fails or degrades. For example, if a fibre leased line goes down, SD-WAN might instantly shift your critical traffic onto a backup broadband or 4G link to keep you online.

Built-in load balancing means it can even use all links at once to maximise throughput. The result is higher uptime and more consistent performance for your users. SD-WAN also lets you prioritise important applications (like VoIP or video conferencing) to ensure those always get the necessary bandwidth and minimal latency. In short, it provides a fast, reliable network experience across all your sites – often better than legacy networks ever could.

Modern businesses rely heavily on cloud-based services (Office 365, Salesforce, Azure/AWS, VoIP platforms, etc.), and SD-WAN is designed with that in mind. Traditionally, branch offices had to send cloud-destined traffic over a central MPLS link to headquarters and then out to the internet – a slow, indirect path. SD-WAN eliminates this inefficiency by allowing branch locations to break out to the internet locally and connect directly to cloud services.

This means significantly lower latency and less bandwidth waste, as you’re not backhauling cloud traffic through a core site. Each branch can access SaaS applications or public cloud data centers via the nearest internet gateway, speeding up applications and improving user experience. SD-WAN vendors also often provide real-time analytics and path selection to route cloud traffic over the best-performing link at any moment. If you use a lot of cloud or hosted apps, SD-WAN will make them run smoother and more predictably for your team.

While the idea of sending sensitive traffic over the public internet might sound risky, SD-WAN has robust security features built in. It encrypts traffic end-to-end between your sites (using technologies like IPsec VPN tunnels), so data is protected from eavesdropping. Many SD-WAN solutions also integrate advanced security functions or easily pair with them – such as next-generation firewalls, web filtering, intrusion prevention, and even zero-trust access controls.

In fact, SD-WAN is a key component of the newer SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) architecture, which combines networking and security in the cloud. The bottom line is that an SD-WAN can be as secure as a traditional private network, if not more so. You get granular control over traffic and can enforce security policies uniformly across all branches. No performance is sacrificed for security – you can use cheaper internet links confidently because the SD-WAN will keep your data safe through encryption and integrated security measures.

One of the biggest operational benefits of SD-WAN is how much simpler it is to manage compared to legacy networks. Everything is controlled through software – usually via a central cloud-managed dashboard – rather than countless individual device configs. This centralised orchestration and zero-touch provisioning allow new sites or changes to be rolled out quickly, often without needing an engineer on-site. For example, if you open a new branch, you can ship an SD-WAN appliance there, plug in any available internet links, and have it automatically pull its configuration from the central controller.

This reduces manual work, resource needs, and downtime when setting up new locations. Policies (like prioritising certain application traffic or enforcing security rules) can be defined once and pushed network-wide. Overall, SD-WAN gives your IT team far greater agility – you can respond to business needs (adding bandwidth, adding sites, changing providers) in minutes or hours instead of days or weeks. That agility is a huge advantage in today’s fast-paced environment.

Beyond connecting offices, SD-WAN can also benefit your remote and home-based workers. Some SD-WAN solutions allow you to extend the network fabric to teleworkers, giving them a small SD-WAN device or software client at home. This means a home office could enjoy enterprise-grade connectivity, with secure direct internet access and even multi-path connectivity (e.g. using home broadband and 4G simultaneously for reliability).

In a post-Covid world of hybrid working, these capabilities are incredibly valuable – they ensure remote staff can access cloud apps or corporate resources with the same performance and security as in-office staff. Essentially, SD-WAN can bring the office network to wherever your employees are, increasing productivity and consistency for distributed teams. Not every business will need this feature, but if you have critical remote users (executives, developers, call centre staff at home, etc.), SD-WAN can be a game-changer for them too.