SD-WAN for Reliable Internet and Voice with Lower Costs
It’s 2018, and options for your organization’s Internet connection and voice service are plentiful. Connection speeds are getting faster while prices are going down. With more options than ever, providers are competing for your business. Smart SD-WAN firewalls are even more affordable too. These devices are power efficient, provide enterprise security, and can automatically leverage two low-cost Internet connections to give organizations high levels of reliability.
Smart Gateways with SD-WAN
Gateways, or routers, have been able to perform lots of high end security filtering and WAN connection balancing for many years now. The issue was that you also needed to pay through the nose and have a highly skilled networking staff to properly manage this functionality. Now, inexpensive security gateways like Cisco’s Meraki MX line are able to leverage the cloud to make smart decisions, or SD-WAN, to keep connections between multiple sites up even when some connections go down.
There is no longer a need to use MPLS or other high-cost carrier locked solutions. The Meraki can use SD-WAN to take two low cost connections and use them both to dramatically increase reliability. This allows you to add and remove low cost Internet connections from any provider as needed and still maintain secure connectivity to branch offices and remote workers. On top of that, these devices provide industry leading Web Filtering and Intrusion Prevention to limit your risk significantly.
Internet Options
MCS has recommended Fiber Internet for organizations in the past. Fiber give high speeds, high reliability, and a guaranteed service level agreements (SLAs). We still recommend this service for larger organizations that need an abundance of upload bandwidth as fiber connections usually come with matched upload and download speeds, but the cost is typically much higher, by at least 4 times or more. With the use of a smart gateway, organizations of any size can use a low-cost cable Internet connection along with a low-cost DSL service that can automatically fail over and load balance using both providers. This is invisible to the user and can make for a connection to the Internet that is even more reliable than fiber at a much lower cost.
Voice
Business class voice connections have come a long way since the days of a T1 based PRI. Now, it’s all about VoIP. In the early days, VoIP connections suffered from poor quality and reliability. The technology has matured now and a VoIP based voice path can be more reliable, of higher quality, and much less expensive. Using a VoIP provider for your voice lines through a carrier like NexVortex can deliver a reliable service with automatic fail-over. MCS has been using NexVortex for years for our voice service at our headquarters in Springfield, IL. The service and quality has been nothing short of excellent.
How to Switch
MCS is a reseller for most Internet and phone providers and can put together a solution that works for you. In most cases, we can increase security, reliability, and speeds while also reducing your monthly spend. There is no cost to have our team provide you with a quote. MCS has the experience to properly implement SD-WAN for any organization. We will do all of the leg work and we have saved many organizations money, month after month. Contact us today and see what we can do for you.