SD-WAN is more than just a buzzword, it’s become the standard in enterprise deployments. Projected to reach $8 billion¹ in market value by 2021, organizations are understanding the benefits of this low cost, agile alternative to traditional branch routers.
Being able to dynamically share network bandwidth by choosing the most efficient path, SD-WAN allows enterprises to eliminate expensive private network circuits and still balance traffic.
Although SD-WAN has a lot of benefits, there is one drawback to these sophisticated devices. SD-WAN routers run on large stacks of software which require constant firmware updates. These are a necessity, but we all know more updates increases the chance for network events to become large, costly disruptions – with the cost of downtime being $5,600 per minute², outages are something that most organizations can’t afford. The solution that can reduce the impact of these events – Smart Out-of-Band™ (Smart OOB) from Opengear.
Top 3 Reasons
1. Diagnoses the issue
Everyone’s gotten that dreaded call at 3 am, there’s an issue with the network and without Smart Out-of-Band, more often than not, network administrators are left scratching their heads wondering what to do and where to start. Identifying the source of an outage without visibility across the network can take hours and to make matters worse, this all could’ve occurred at a site hundreds of miles away. Instead of wasting hours driving to a site to troubleshoot, Smart OOB allows network administrators immediately and remotely fix the issue.
2. Allows for always-on access
No enterprise can afford the costs associated with an outage – and without complete network visibility, these disruptions could last for days. Opengear devices deliver reliable access when needed. Smart OOB allows organizations to begin troubleshooting issues. Failover to Cellular, ensures continued internet connectivity for remote LANs and equipment with high speed 4GE when the primary internet link is down, delivering resilience.
3. Decreases costs
An organization that doesn’t have Smart OOB can spend thousands of dollars in just a week when a network error occurs. Having to send staff and truck rolls out to the site is costly let alone the time it takes to identify the issue once they are there. Smart OOB allows network administrators to remediate the problem in minutes remotely.
SD-WAN + Smart OOB = Enterprise-Grade WAN
SD-WAN deployments provide flexibility and reduce costs while maintaining secure connections. Allowing enterprises to utilize and aggregate multiple bandwidth connections, these routers do introduce a single point of failure that can result in potential downtime. Smart OOB supports these deployments, giving staff the ability to remotely get networks back up.
Learn more about how Smart OOB can support your SD-WAN deployment.
¹ https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS42925117
² https://blogs.gartner.com/andrew-lerner/2014/07/16/the-cost-of-downtime/
