Following a successful trial in South Africa, Vodacom Business Africa has announced its plan to make its Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) solution accessible to users throughout the forty-seven African countries where it operates.
With its unrivaled performance and cost advantages, higher agility and quality of service, improved reliability, and increased security, SD-WAN is quickly becoming the preferred corporate option. Businesses have adopted SD-WAN in various sectors, including mining, manufacturing, and retail. Compared to traditional methods, this technology allows a high-quality connection to every site, including those in remote or inaccessible places.
Some of the features of SD-WAN include increased organizational agility and quality of service, as well as increased reliability and security. SD-WAN increases productivity by controlling bandwidth availability and utilization, routing traffic, and prioritizing protocols that are essential to the organization’s operation.
This prioritization is crucial when dealing with business-critical systems and automated processes, as a connection gap might result in production delays and revenue loss.
Wale Odeyemi, Executive Head of Strategic Marketing for Vodacom Business Africa, says, “We are removing the hurdles to the connection that have been holding back the development of African companies by introducing this service to the continent. “These include increased cybersecurity concerns, mounting data needs, and prices, and sluggish or unresponsive digital apps that hinder productivity.”
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Key benefits that make the SD-WAN unique
“Vodacom Business Africa provides an end-to-end SD-WAN solution, meaning we supply both the physical network underlay and the digital overlay so that you don’t have to approach various providers to build up the network you need,” Odeyemi emphasized. Companies may connect to numerous providers and let their software select the quickest, most efficient link for carrying out specific tasks.
“Additionally, you don’t have to replace an existing network when adopting our solution entirely. What you already have may be fortified. Our SD-WAN is designed as an overlay technology to function over MPLS and hybrid WANs already in place. Moreover, it may be tailored to the specific requirements of every given enterprise and adjusted to accommodate its evolving requirements”, he added.
A team of technology experts is entirely in charge of managing the Vodacom Business Africa SD-WAN, and it streamlines networks across multiple locations locally and internationally. This is essential for organizations managing multiple data centres and critical branch operations across private and public cloud environments. Clients benefit from faster application response times, more network transparency, and a consolidated view of data consumption across all assets. This is true whether those assets are located in a central data centre, distributed manufacturing facility, or branch office.
According to Odeyemi, “this central management is another major drawcard, as it enables the deployment of a new branch or data-centre provisions without the costly expert labour traditionally involved with network upgrades.” “This central management is another major drawcard, as it enables the deployment of a new branch or data-centre provisions.”
“As a transformational leader, Vodacom Business Africa is facilitating digital transformation across the continent by democratizing access to cutting-edge technology and giving companies of all sizes and sectors a leg up in the global economy.”
Service Components of SD-WAN
SD-WAN is an alternative and more dynamic approach to designing and deploying enterprise WAN solutions – providing greater network visibility and control. It aims to replace traditional branch routers with appliances that use virtualization, application-level policies, and network overlays to make several broadband internet links behave like a dedicated managed circuit.
Since the internet has become the worldwide thread that connects everything, networks need to provide more than just bandwidth. By streamlining and speeding up the WAN, we can decrease or do away with the requirement for private WAN technologies like MPLS. The software makes the WAN more service-centric, with monitoring and managing traffic focusing on the delivery of apps.
SD-WAN Edge creates and terminates secured and encrypted tunnels over wired or wireless underlay networks such as broadband internet, WiFi and LTE, and DIA and MPLS core networks. It also performs application-based QoS and security policy enforcement, application forwarding over one or more WAN connections, and QoS performance measurements over each WAN to determine optimal path selection. It is also equipped with a Gateway; the SD-WAN Gateway is a notable instance of an
SD-WAN Edge also enables sites interconnected via the SD-WAN to connect to other sites interconnected via alternative VPN technologies. This provides physical or virtual device management for all SD-WAN Edges and SD-WAN Gateways associated with the controller.
Additionally, it has a controller used for configuration and activation, IP address management, and pushing policies onto SD-WAN Edges and SD-WAN Gateways. The Service Orchestrator manages the SD-WAN service lifecycle, including service fulfillment, performance, control, assurance, usage, analytics, and security and policy.