SD-WAN

Building resilient home office / remote office internet connectivity

In this article, I'll briefly explain how you can exponentially add resilience and reliability to your home office / remote office internet connection. Future articles will go in-depth into how you can achieve this on your remote office network.

The challenge

Technical challenges arise when working remotely.

Of all things foremost on my mind as a remote worker is internet connectivity. My professional endeavors require me to be online constantly. Any hiccup in network communications can be a disaster, as without reliable internet, I simply cannot get my work done or communicate with my colleagues and customers. Money is lost and I look bad, so I build my network to survive intermittent issues and long-term outages, planned and unplanned.

For those of you in the same boat, I'll provide one single recommendation to help you boost your remote work productivity and performance overall, by increasing the reliability and resilience of your remote office internet connection. As a side benefit, you'll be able to keep your family members in the green with their miscellaneous online activities (shopping, watching, gaming, etc.).

SD-WAN for the win!

The single biggest performance gains that you can make on your remote office network have nothing to do with infrastructure, but software. SD-WAN is a game-changer.

What is SD-WAN? Simply put, SD-WAN enables you to apply software policies to different types of traffic on your network. Moreover, SD-WAN enables redundant network architecture. You can literally turn two internet connections into one. Think about that. Combining two, low-cost internet connections into one bundle instantly adds redundancy and load-sharing. But wait! There's more!

Virtual traffic policies

What does this mean?

SD-WAN policies enable allocation of bandwidth on my internet connection to specific applications.

For me, Zoom and Teams meetings take precedence as this is how I communicate with co-workers, bosses and customers. In order to guarantee that I always have bandwidth available for these applications, SD-WAN allows me to create policies which dedicates a part of my internet connection to those applications. I apply a similar policy to my home internet usage including streaming and games, etc.

By applying polices to the SD-WAN interface, I can control application utilization across both of my internet circuits.

Conclusion

You can easily and affordably accomplish a huge performance upgrade by applying SD-WAN technology to your remote office internet connection. In my next article, I will walk you through the how's and what's.