🕸️Transforming Business from the Top Down by using Last Mile SD-WAN🔝

Why would anyone want to change from legacy wide area networking to software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN)? There needs to be a business reason for it and not just a technical one. Too often, technology projects are initiated from the bottom up, with techies choosing the technology first and then attempting to retrofit processes and business goals to align with the newly acquired widgets. Unfortunately, this approach often leads to projects failing to deliver true business value, as the problem being solved doesn't necessarily address core business needs.

Nothing highlights this more than the bottom up definition of SD-WAN by Gartner:

A man by the name of Steve Jobs, a million times smarter than me, explained it perfectly when he said, "Starting with the customer does not mean you double down on your app when 70% of your target audience simply do not use it..."

The correct approach is to start at the business level—from the top down. This process is detailed in the article, "The Skeleton of a Request for Information." The approach may vary between service providers and businesses due to their differing critical success factors.

Service Provider Critical Success Factors

For service providers, the critical success factors could potentially be:

1. Reduce Churn: Poor service assurance in the legacy environment can be corrected during technology deployment.

2. Reduce Headcount: SD-WAN requires fewer resources to manage the same number of links.

3. Improve Revenue Generation: This is a result of quicker provisioning and activating of services for the last mile.

4. Reduce Operational Costs: Use different regional distribution technologies such as Carrier Ethernet instead of MPLS, but still provide the same functionality. (Carrier Ethernet Benefits: Ubiquity: Carrier Ethernet is an established, well-defined, standards-based protocol that’s easy to deploy and simple to manage. Unlike many protocols that tend to require a fair amount of tweaking to get different vendor solutions to inter-operate, the Carrier Ethernet specification is so well-defined that any solution from any service provider will likely work with any other. Also, because Carrier Ethernet operates at layer 2, there is no requirement for any kind of LAN-WAN conversation technology or multiple routing protocols.Cost Effectiveness: The provisioning of Carrier Ethernet connectivity is much cheaper than other services like ATM or other leased line circuits. An example is the cheaper cost of any customer premise equipment.Flexible Technology: Carrier Ethernet is able to be deployed in a number of topologies and media.)

5. Be Competitive: As stated in this article on Network World, the service provider market is going to invest heavily in SD-WAN in five years. You can't compete if you're not in the game.

Business Critical Success Factors

For businesses, the critical success factors could potentially be:

1. Improve Employee Productivity: Implement branch office solutions that provide better availability and reliability.

2. Enhance Corporate Reputation for Data Protection: Ensure that the network is not vulnerable to breaches or penetration.

3. Reduce Operational Costs: This is achieved by leveraging cloud-based technologies for operational efficiencies.

4. Different Type of Headcount: Reduce reliance on telnet jockeys and rely on orchestration.

These critical factors can be used to state the business requirements for SD-WAN technology. This forms the basis of technical functional specifications that include the underlying processes. Finally, you can specify the scope of work and choose your preferred solution. This top-down method has a higher probability of success than the techie bottom-up approach.

Orange Business Services provides the following SD-WAN drivers and lists, in priority, what customers have stated as feedback in a survey. One of the fundamental drivers is to make connectivity less of a hassle, a.k.a. the KISS principle. One of the first articles I wrote here on LinkedIn about #SD-WAN was based on this theme and titled "The primary goal of SD-WAN should be to make networking less complicated."

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Join Fusion Broadband South Africa in the SD-WAN revolution, where business transformation starts from the top down! 💼🚀