Leaving DIY Behind

With a lot involved in deploying SD-WAN, leveraging a managed service provider (MSP) can help businesses keep their IT staff forward-thinking. There are many to choose from, and knowing the criteria to get the best fit is essential.

Choosing an MSP Tailored to Business Size

In searching for an MSP to align with, the size and focus are important so that businesses receive service based on their needs and style. For instance, if an SMB pairs up with an MSP designed for enterprise networking, MSP may not provide the personalized touch the business requires. They are simply too large. On the other hand, selecting a start-up MSP may not be mature with respect to its service offerings. However, they might be able to deliver SD-WAN, which may not meet overarching needs.

Missing Complementary Services

Once a business chooses an MSP for SD-WAN, they’ll want them to provide more than just services. For instance, businesses may want to add:

• Voice services for collaboration for all their locations
• Security services

Businesses should want to partner with an MSP that can consolidate these services more holistically. They will want a partner that can help with their overall technology roadmap. For instance, integrating the network security of SD-WAN with endpoint security.

Security at the MSP Level

This relates to how the MSP is protecting themselves which effectively protects the customer. If their network is not reliable and secure, that will mean downtime and security issues for their customers. An easy way to investigate this is to know what type of certifications they have. A typical one to look for is SOCII (service operation center), where they have their processes not only well established but are independently tested by third-party auditors. These auditors will verify the following:

• Network Security
• Data Security
• Process Security

MSP WAN Diversity

As they look for an MSP, businesses may find that many lack WAN service diversity and are not carrier agnostic. Businesses will want to ask questions such as:

• Do they offer just one type of circuit?
• Do they partner with just one carrier and offer just one service?
• Do they have the relationships and product breadth to cover many different transport types over many different regions?

That’s the benefit of picking an MSP that has those relationships to bring in a complete solution set and deliver it over one single bill instead of receiving bills from all the individual locations.

The Sangoma Difference

Let’s take a look at how Sangoma’s Managed SD-WAN service delivers this solution-set to customers and look at some key strengths.

Dedicated Implementation Team
When an SD-WAN solution is deployed, our dedicated implementation team begins to establish a relationship with the customer; they bring the customer through the entire implementation lifecycle, including post-implementation, monitoring, and support. This dedicated project management style approach is a crucial differentiator of Sangoma’s.

Owned & Operated Robust Core Network Backbone
Sangoma has pioneered the SD-WAN landscape with its own privately owned and operated PCI-Certified and HIPAA-compliant backbone. We have a diverse set of WAN transport options that brings all those transport options into a single network backbone that enables our clients to have the carrier and transport diversity that enables them to be successful.

Managed, Maintained & Monitoring 24/7/365
A major strength of Sangoma’s SD-WAN service is that customers can completely offload their IT resources from the burden of managing, monitoring, and maintaining the SD-WAN service. Sangoma’s dedicated network operations center (NOC) does all this for them remotely. If any issues arise, the NOC team is automatically notified and resolves the issue, even before it has any chance of reaching the customer’s network. Since Sangoma has a homegrown SD-WAN solution, customers have true experts on their side, assuring total satisfaction.

Simplified Billing
There is a lot of value in having customized invoices that simplify a customer’s back office approach to processing bills and allow the back office staff to be more strategic in their efforts.

Sangoma’s Managed SD-WAN solution ensures customers securely connect any user, any device, anywhere, anytime, over any transport. It provides connectivity uptime for users in the most secure way.

Summarizing SD-WAN Objectives

In summarizing the need for SD-WAN, there are 3 main objectives:

Uptime & Application Availability
Users need to be able to reach their application whenever needed, so network uptime is vital. Included in uptime is also a security component. For instance, if there is a security attack that takes down the network, the user applications become unavailable. So, ensuring security incidents don’t occur is also key.

Visibility & Management of WAN Workloads
With the resiliency of an SD-WAN network, a failure could occur without users ever noticing and without impact. Still, visibility and management of those individual components are important to ensure the trouble has been identified and remediated in order to get back to primary services.

Simplifying the Complexity of Telco Billing
Consolidating all the individual bills from each carrier in their respective regions offers a nice white-glove approach and saves customers time and resources.

So, is DIY the right approach to SD-WAN?

SD-WAN technology is advantageous to incorporate into business networks. Still, it can worsen the complexities of network management for organizations that lack the IT resources to deploy and maintain an SD-WAN solution. They may look to MSPs to deliver managed SD-WAN to replace their traditional WAN architecture. MSPs can provide simplified SD-WAN operations by leveraging a multi-vendor strategy enabling them to augment their offering to provide agility and a differentiated service tailored to business requirements.

Get in touch with one of our Managed SD-WAN specialists.

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