Scaling cloud services to equip a growing business represents one of the greatest challenges that enterprises must overcome when they have a distributed network. This is evident in the findings reported from the Remote Office Networks Post Business and Reliability Risk: A Survey of IT Professionals. The report identifies some of the factors influencing infrastructure changes in geographically dispersed enterprises.

Some of the key findings include:

• Enterprises are often utilizing a centralized approach to secure branch locations that can open up the organization to the risk of a breach.
• When there are numerous locations to secure, a highly distributed network presents unique difficulties in enabling network security.
•  When it comes to cloud-first enterprises, nine out of 10 companies use a centrally managed network, negatively impacting productivity.
• Network interruptions impact 75% of enterprises each year, with thousands of dollars in productivity costs for every hour the network is down.

The study details how the difficulties related to site personnel and a lack of IT security limit the scaling of cloud services critical for growth in a digital era. One of the more common network challenges is the inability to direct traffic to the nearest point of entry when transmitting to a cloud platform.

Many enterprises are implementing software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) to improve the performance of cloud solutions. This solution helps overcome some challenges by offering the ability to scale cloud services and the agility to handle changing access of cloud-based solutions.

Other concerns identified in the report include:

Centralized Security: Businesses recognize that a centralized security solution isn’t capable of securing branch locations or the fleets of Internet of Things (IoT) devices implemented to support productivity and efficiency objectives. Businesses need to weigh the benefits introduced by SD-WAN in reducing the risk of a security breach. These solutions remove the problem of leaving remote branch locations vulnerable.

One of the most challenging aspects of centralized security is not having adequate support staff located at remote sites that can resolve issues. 65% of enterprises have their IT staff members traveling to branches to resolve networking problems. The cost of travel only multiplies the high cost of downtime.

Frequent Instances of Downtime: 49% of the 75% of organizations that experience network interruptions several times a year require at least three hours to resolve the problem. The time it takes to troubleshoot the network issue and get them back online has a high cost, sometimes many thousands of dollars each hour.

In order to solve these difficulties, enterprises are increasingly implementing virtualized networking in the form of SD-WAN. It reduces the barrier to scaling cloud services with increased agility, improved application performance, and centralized management that eliminates the need for travel to branch locations. It also extends security all the way to edge devices and network segmentation makes it easier to isolate a threat until it can be mitigated.To explore the possibilities of SD-WAN for your enterprise, contact us at Diversified Technology Group. From evaluating your needs to selecting the best SD-WAN solution, you need a guide you can trust.