Growth Pains: How SD-WAN Can Help Multi-Site Businesses Avoid IT Overload

Growing multi-site businesses often reach a tipping point where their IT teams become permanently 'firefighting', according to experts from Optus and Cisco. This is a sign that customers are outgrowing their IT departments, which can lead to security gaps and increased risk.

The pressure on growing businesses comes from sheer scale, with growth in devices, locations, and application workloads. Layered on top of this is vendor sprawl, where new vendors come in as leadership changes hands, resulting in a patchwork that's expensive to run and manage.

SD-WAN (software-defined wide area networking) can change the equation by providing a different way of connecting sites, harnessing a platform that takes away communication worries. This means prioritizing business-critical traffic, spinning up new sites quickly, and managing the network from a single view.