There are very few business decisions taken today that have absolutely no ramifications with regards to IT. That’s because of the ubiquity of technology: it’s the engine room of even “traditional” industries like engineering and manufacturing. More recently, digital-first verticals are living and breathing via tech.

If an organization aims to move into a new geography, or explore a new market, open a branch office or a retail outlet, the required technology must be planned, procured, and effectively deployed. As a mainstay of business today, technological considerations rank as high as personnel or tax policy.

While opening a new retail outlet in a foreign city might seem like a slow-moving project, in today’s business environment, short-term considerations also feature highly. For retailers, there’s Couple’s Day, Easter, Black Friday, and Christmas; for restaurant operators, there are pop-up events; and any organization can exhibit at a trade show or sponsor an outside sporting event. Regardless, being online safely, securely, and quickly is hugely important.

For short term peaks and troughs in demand or long-term investment in new ventures, ensuring proper technology foundations is paramount for success. Providing proper connectivity for the tools of the trade is a key part of the foundation, whether those tools comprise mobile ePoS or high-end edge-based servers. Access to the company-wide networks of business information systems and services (and to the internet) is the first step in any business journey.

For many years, providing connectivity required — for example — a new retail brick and mortar store and would take months. Leased lines had to be commissioned, and expensive networking hardware procured and installed on-site by skilled technicians.

However, today, deployments of interconnectivity enabling technologies are fast and business focused. Software-defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) provides the type of elastic provisioning that’s suited to today’s business practices. Instead of months to get a new site connected, think days or even hours. SD-WAN is perfectly suited to the changes that happen in today’s businesses in hours, capable of immediate availability and burst demand provisioning.

In addition to satisfying short term demands, SD-WAN technology also has significant long-term benefits to the way an organization operates. Today’s managed SD-WAN solutions provide full visibility onto the applications and service levels in use across the wide area network. That insight means that specific applications can be prioritized or throttled at the touch of a button. At month-end, the finance applications get priority; during peak holiday seasons, sales systems may need extra bandwidth for several days. With SD-WAN, the network becomes just another resource that can be tuned in real-time to the needs of the business.

However, the mistake made by many smaller companies is to attempt to provision SD-WAN without oversight onto the entire network. That ability comes from using a suitably qualified managed service provider, complete with their years of experience in connective technologies. In a recent Tech Means Business podcast, we spoke to Peter Maquera of the Philippines’ Globe Telecom, a national provider that leverages SD-WAN technology from Nuage Networks (part of Nokia).

The same Nuage Networks technology is used on a national level and rolled out by over 80 MSPs around the world including NTT Netmagic and Vodafone-Idea in India, Vertel in Australia, and BT right across APAC.

The Nuage Networks SD-WAN hardware and software can be configured alongside powerful communications capabilities, giving companies both the network and the connectivity flexibility that agile businesses need to compete, and adapt to changing circumstances and new market discoveries.

In the podcast, the host, Joe Green, asked Peter from Globe Telecom who his primary customers were for SD-WAN. He said: “Businesses with multi-sites: so retail, manufacturing, bank branches, gas stations, coffee shops […] I think the smallest I’ve seen maybe would be five sites, and one that’s close to 1,000 sites. So, a wide range.”

As the benefits of SD-WAN spread from the enterprise-grade user down to even modest outfits, many are discovering the advantages of the technology in business settings that are widely differing, yet the same in the sense of all requiring an adaptable connection to the rest of the organization’s networked systems.

To find out more about SD-WAN from Nuage Networks, read more here, or give the podcast a listen for real-world examples. From Nuage’s site, you will be able to locate a Nuage partner capable of addressing your concerns, answering any questions, and rolling out this next-generation of networking technology.