SD-WAN is one of the fastest-growing segments of the network infrastructure market. Designed correctly, it will deliver unique advantages, enabling true digital transformation while reducing costs and management time and increasing application performance, availability, visibility and user experience.
While the benefits of SD-WAN are obvious, we know it can often be a challenge to select the appropriate approach to design, implementation, and ongoing management.
Many organizations consider working with traditional resellers, taking the ‘buy and build’ approach: investing in the technology and implementing and managing the project in-house. Others opt to work with existing carriers or service providers and take a managed service.
In our experience, both of these options carry risk.
When you take a step back and look under the hood, you might ask yourself whether your internal teams are experienced enough. Do you have enough people bandwidth? Is the service provider an expert in the field? Will your internal team get the career development opportunities they need? And, what risks are you taking personally by making the wrong decision?
Forward-thinking Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders are taking a different approach. With Teneo, they’re maintaining co-ownership of their SD-WAN project while leveraging our expertise to augment their team’s capabilities and deliver projects faster with lower risk.
So, in this co-ownership, shared-risk, approach what benefits are you likely to enjoy?
1 – You’ll fill people, skills, and knowledge gaps and up-skill your in-house team
Let’s be clear: many network, infrastructure, and security teams often underestimate the sheer time, resource, knowledge, and skills needed to design, deploy and operate a successful SD-WAN environment.
While hiring new talent is an option, it can be expensive and time-consuming. But, as you’ll be aware, good talent is at a premium due to shortages in the job market, and that’s not to mention the time it takes to recruit, onboard, and train new employees.
By working with Teneo as your SD-WAN partner, you can utilize our years of experience and team of seasoned experts.
As well as guiding you through the process with our well-oiled methodology, we’ll take away time-consuming menial tasks, such as reading through lengthy documentation to help you keep up to speed with new developments.
With knowledge transfer, we’ll also help train and develop internal staff. And, should you want to manage the solution in-house in the future, we can gradually transfer management responsibilities back to the in-house team while ensuring business continuity.
Put simply, it’s less hassle and less risk.
2 – You’ll be expertly supported in the decision-making process
SD-WAN projects often fail because teams struggle to align a collective vision with business objectives and technical requirements. Such misalignments, misunderstandings, and isolated decision-making ultimately lead to project back-tracking, overruns, and unrealized business benefits.
To help with the decision-making process, many organizations choose to start their journey with an SD-WAN workshop facilitated by Teneo’s team of seasoned experts. Using our proven methodology, we’ll guide you through the critical steps of the decision-making, design, and deployment process.
Providing real-life examples, we’ll help you avoid common pitfalls, focus on business challenges and technical requirements, and will drive a structured approach to build a collaborative SD-WAN solution and business case.
3 – You’ll enjoy smooth, quick, and risk-free design and deployment
Designing and deploying an SD-WAN solution internally without experience can be risky. It involves working with live networks, after all.
The more time spent planning and testing at the design and deployment stage, the faster an SD-WAN migration happens, with less risk.
With this in mind, it’s clear that finding the right support is critical. With Teneo, we’ll help you carry out high and low-level design, technical specification, and maintenance. A network readiness assessment and testing in a closely modeled lab environment will also be carried out to de-risk deployment and ensure a smooth transition.
As well as managing and carrying out knowledge transfer during the operations stage, we’ll help you keep pace with technology change and advise on upgrade paths and new technology options that will fit your organization’s roadmap.
4 – You’ll accelerate time to value
Unsurprisingly, more than 50% of IT projects go over program or budget, seriously delaying time to value.
This is often due to not having the necessary in-house resource, skills, and experience to avoid common pitfalls, resulting in project overruns, heightened risk and increased cost of change.
By leveraging our insights, we’ll help you to deploy SD-WAN faster, enabling you to achieve ROI in the shortest time possible. We’ll carry out management work at a predictable monthly cost, ensure you have the right tools in place, and through constant tuning, we’ll guarantee you save money in the long term.
As we’ll enable you to identify issues in near real-time pro-actively, you’ll also be able to take corrective action before users even notice or complain, ensuring your team will spend less time dealing with reactive service desk tickets.
5 – You’ll select the right technology and avoid technology lock-ins
Very often, organizations buy technology that’s not fit for purpose. This could be for a whole host of reasons, such as failure to approach SD-WAN adoption with business outcomes in mind, vendor influence, persuasion by a salesperson, or because it was positioned as ‘cheap and easy’.
However, purchasing the wrong technology ultimately costs organizations extra time and money. Then there’s technology lock-in, often a tactic of carriers or large service providers. They care less about what solution a business buys and more about locking them into a contract.
Given the rapid pace of technology change, there’ll be new, better SD-WAN technology versions available six months to a year from now, so businesses need the flexibility to pivot.
As Teneo is independent, we’ll help you avoid technology lock-in with specific vendors and instead enable you to adopt new options just in time to take advantage of them, ensuring you have the right technology fit for your business.
We’ve seen time and time again that many organizations failing to realize the full potential of SD-WAN have taken the wrong approach. But thankfully, there is a solution.
With Teneo, we’ll ensure you get deployment right, the first time.
Want to know more about how we can help you move forward with your SD-WAN plan?
See more about our full suite of SD-WAN services, or book a time to discuss SD-WAN with us.
