For companies beginning to invest in cloud solutions, a challenge quickly emerges: how do you meet the performance requirements and security demands of cloud solutions with a traditional WAN? The answer, in many cases, is some form of bring your own network (BYON). From managing costs to handling bandwidth-heavy solutions, BYON is an approach that helps companies deliver the right customer experience.
BYON comes in a variety of forms with each offering unique advantages to companies needing to augment the connectivity their internet service provider (ISP) is dispensing:
SD-WAN: Software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) allows an autonomous approach to networking with companies able to offset the cost of multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) with broadband internet and other low-cost connectivity options. SD-WAN provides highly-reliable networking through automatic rerouting of traffic that hits congestion or latency issues as well as a central management and troubleshooting dashboard.
UCaaS: Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) is not a network, but it is a way to augment the performance of existing solutions to improve the customer experience. Users can be added or removed in a matter of minutes allowing communications to scale easily with fluctuations in demand. The solution also improves collaboration – offering continuity across a variety of communication formats – and can be added to the existing network to dramatically improve connections with business partners and customers.
Managed Security: Companies are struggling to keep up with the various ways that malicious intruders might gain access to their networks, and outsourcing security concerns to an expert can be a helpful solution. This is another solution that provides a BYON approach to protecting the network and systems of a company – offering reliable connectivity so that companies can enjoy uninterrupted productivity.
“Bring Your Own” solutions aren’t for every company, but they do offer some distinct advantages when they are a good fit:
Customization: Adding a BYON tool to the network helps companies address specific pain points in a way that fits their budget. It’s a method of getting the features desired in a network without ripping out all of the lines and starting over.
Continuity: Many BYON solutions offer automatic failover that delivers reliable business continuity to a company, and those solutions also offer diverse connectivity options that automatically support a next-best alternative when a networking problem is encountered such as with SD-WAN.
Compliance: For companies that have specific compliance regulations, BYON offers a way to add coverage for a particular security concern or to increase tracking of where data is residing at any given time.
If you’ve discovered that your network is no longer adequately supporting your cloud solutions and compliance or security needs, contact us at Access Tech. We can help you determine which BYON solution will help solve your challenges.