When your business grows to such a degree where you need to interconnect two websites to work as one, you’ll have to start looking into wide-area networking (WAN) solutions.
Corporations are either growing at unprecedented rates or dying out in this day and age, and it’s all about the survival of the fittest. Only the companies that can withstand turbulence will come out on top.
Most top companies don’t limit their operations – instead, they work to expand their influence as much as possible. More often than not, this prompts more websites than one, and that’s precisely where a lot of companies face a blunder.
Wide Area Networking isn’t a new concept, and it has been around in one way or the other for the past couple of decades. As the digital revolution is now in full swing, the way companies use wide area networking has changed by a considerable margin.
In this article, we’ll talk about wide-area networking and its relationship with business, what makes a good wan, and what the future brings for this technology.
What is WAN?
WAN stands for Wide Area Networking. In layman’s terms, a WAN is an IP-based network that applies to two or more websites. Companies around the world use it to make networking simpler, more streamlined, and easier to manage.
WANs can include anything that a company wants. Most internal corporate structures are built on a WAN and communications, deployment, and a selection of other processes. The sophistication of the WAN that this structure is running on dictates the performance of the system itself.
This technology has been around for a while, but it’s not without its downfalls. The current industry standard is MPLS, which is a less than ideal solution. SD-WAN, a better WAN technology than MPLS, sees a lot of application in recent years, and its rise to prominence isn’t slowing down.
What Makes a Good Wan?
Many things define good WAN. The hypothetical internal operations can be as vast or as small as possible, so a good WAN needs to adapt and scale to size with what it can bring to the table. Generally, the tell-tales of a good WAN are:
- Superb connection stability
- Scalable bandwidth
- Low latency
- Direct fiber connections
A wan is only as good as its ability to help companies streamline and improve their operations. Since most companies have a data-driven approach to both their internal and external dealings, a WAN is an irreplaceable piece of technology. While some might need fantastic bandwidth and bullet-proof security, other companies might search for the lowest possible latency.
Whatever the case may be, a good wan is always an affordable wan. WAN technology isn’t exactly the cheapest tool on the market. If your business is struggling financially, you might not be able to afford the top-tier WAN that your industry counterpart uses – and you shouldn’t aim for it either.
Benefits of Using a WAN
WANs are an ideal solution for all scales, as they can be adapted to fit just about any corporate needs. A company that operates on a relatively small scale locally isn’t going to need the same WAN as an international corporate conglomerate.
There are more than a couple of benefits when it comes to utilizing WAN technology, such as:
- Improved security
- Data centralization
- Better bandwidth
- Lower latency
- Network consistency
Perhaps the most notable benefit of using WAN to communicate internally with your corporation is centralization. WAN does miracles to streamline and augment how your data is stored, and since everything is internal, everything is as fast as possible.
Future of WAN
It’s tough to say what the future of wide-area networks is. For starters, SD-WAN is likely going to overtake MPLS as the primary WAN technology, as it’s already near that point at the time of writing this article. Perhaps new solutions will emerge that will further improve WAN, allowing for more widespread business applications.
Final Thoughts
WAN technology is a remarkable thing that has changed the way that businesses observe, use, and work with data, as well as a selection of other things. Through WANs, businesses of all shapes and sizes can significantly improve their communications and internal operations, especially during the SARS-COV-2 pandemic.
After the pandemic has passed, this technology will begin to flourish in a new light as more companies begin to use it.