As more employees work from home, companies need a network infrastructure that provides a secure and fast connection between their data centre and cloud services. We look at how VMware can support an increasingly dispersed workforce with SD-WAN.
What kinds of networking challenges do companies face in this new environment? How does VMware SD-WAN eliminate these challenges? We answer these questions and more, and look at how it supports Zoom, the go-to solution for modern workplace communication.
A perfect fit for the modern workplace
Software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) help manage the challenges of the modern workplace. These state-of-the-art networking technologies make it an easier process and using a software-based approach is a perfect fit for cloud and the work from home employment model.
VMware SD-WAN is a best-of-breed solution that offers a simple process for installation and configuration, seamless scalability, and security support as a secure access service edge (SASE) platform. Simply put, it handles impossible networking challenges to help you thrive.
Look at this eBook to see how.
The challenges of the home office
When an entire family is working (or schooling) from home, traffic to and from the home network becomes jammed. Kids are watching videos, playing games or participating in online classes, whilst parents have online meetings and access their company’s cloud-based enterprise applications.
In this congested environment, you need an exceptional network quality of service (QoS). When a kid’s cartoon competes for bandwidth with a parent’s customer call, the parent usually has no way to tell the network that the video call needs more bandwidth than the TV show.
Handling an increasingly busy network
Additionally, company IT teams rarely manage home networks. Instead, they’re handled by the employee. Networking issues can affect employees’ access to cloud applications such as Microsoft 365 or Zoom video conferences over consumer broadband.
Ultimately, new networking policies are required to handle dispersed employees working from home. Companies must embrace software-as-a-service (SaaS) and unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) while pivoting to an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model.
Helping you Zoom into the future
Zoom’s popularity as a Cloud-based video conferencing service has ‘zoomed’ to the top over the last year. If your company uses it, then you will be glad to hear that VMware SD-WAN helps you enjoy mission-critical video optimised on any type of WAN link while working from home.
Just when employees need it most during a heavily congested time of day, VMware SD-WAN provides improvement where it’s needed, mitigating up to 20% packet loss. It also doubles the overall received quality up to 720 HD. And this can really make the difference when working.
Designed for better remote working
VMware SD-WAN vdelivers all the benefits people need to work remotely. It simplifies WAN operations with agility and scale through automation and global WAN visibility. It also has an assured application performance and reliability with transport agnostic performance.
It’s easy to adopt the cloud, with direct access via gateway as a service. It manages on-ramp to cloud and has a network of gateways purposely built and deployed to cloud scale. You also have choices in edge security, end-to-end segmentation and security virtual network function.
Better connectivity with VMware
An inefficient network connectivity results in lack of bandwidth, broken and disrupted connectivity, and poor application performance. But according to a report by Tolly, users of VMware SD-WAN are seeing an improved quality of VoIP call by up to 45% and download times by 71%.
Tolly evaluated the performance of WMware SD-WAN in different scenarios, including working from home. The results showed that the software delivered reliable application performance, optimised network connectivity and security, and operational simplicity.
VMware working from home offers
VMware offer the choice of two WFH packages for home edge sites. Choose from a WFH Subscription, or a WFH Pro Subscription for up to 6 concurrent business devices per user and up to 1Gbps for graphics and downloads.
Both subscriptions deliver improved app reliability and performance for audio/video conferencing, direct SaaS and cloud VPN access, and VMware Edge Network Intelligence, a vendor-agnostic artificial intelligence. All with coverage for unlimited home users and home devices.
This gives IT administrators new insight into non-enterprise networks, including home Wi-Fi networks, to analyse and remediate common working from home problems such as dropped VoIP calls and jittery video conference connections.