Your network is the foundation of your business, and as you scale, it’s important to make sure your Wide Area Network (WAN) is constantly evolving to meet your changing needs. Many businesses find that expansions bring common growing pains like:
- Slow network performance
- Insufficient bandwidth
- Lack of a business continuity solution if your primary WAN link fails
- Too much time spent monitoring, troubleshooting, and maintaining the network
At Compass Solutions, we can help you design, implement, and support a WAN network solution that delivers the uptime you need.
What are My WAN Technology Options?
After assessing your current network, we’ll help you find the right solutions from the right providers to meet your needs.
Common WAN options include:
- MPLS. Multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) is a common solution for mission critical networks. It is a private, secure, IP network that can be monitored and managed from end-point to end-point, and comes with performance guarantees from providers (SLAs).
- VPNs over Public Internet. This technology uses connections to the Internet and then creates secure connections across the Internet to establish a Virtual Private Network (VPN). The benefit of this technology is more bandwidth for the same price. A trade off is that there are no performance guarantees since the traffic traverses the public internet (no SLAs).
- SD-WAN. Software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) is a relatively new option. It is not a replacement for Internet or MPLS connections; it is a service that sits on top of two or more WAN Connections (Internet or MPLS) at a site. Then a device or cloud service will monitor those connections and proactively route traffic to the best/available route. This can be used for business continuity, load balancing, application prioritization, network monitoring, and other purposes.