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March 02, 2020

Getting The Most Out Of Your SD-WAN In A 5G Environment

Organizations of every size, across a variety of industries are developing digital transformation strategies to prepare for emerging markets, all while enhancing the customer experience. 5G promises to bring greater operational efficiencies, enable further automation of business processes and usher in the next wave of intelligent applications. This means that mission critical, real-time applications, such as remote healthcare, emergency dispatch services and autonomous vehicles can be delivered reliably and with near-zero latency. 



5G is expected to reduce the 20 milliseconds of latency time usually experienced by 4G by 95%, to only 1 millisecond, and is expected to be 100 times faster than 4G*. This will open doors for industries such as transportation, manufacturing, healthcare and government to increase efficiencies through automation, enhanced quality of video calls, which allows doctors to treat patients remotely, and enhanced user experience on a network that is no longer overburdened by traffic congestion. 

While 5G will change the landscape of networking, it's not enough to reliably run a plethora of complex applications on its own. An SD-WAN device will help harness the power that 5G offers, ensuring that its speed and capacity are maximized to its full potential. Building a network infrastructure that is ready for the future will ensure you're on top of the newest technology markets. 

The best way to do that is to get the most out of your SD-WAN, while preparing for the future of a 5G environment. 

Reduce Data Transport Times

One of the biggest challenges that surround autonomous vehicles is how much data processing is required to operate them. Copious amounts of data needs to move back and fourth in real time from the network to the car sensors. Even just moments of lag could have catastrophic results. 5G can dramatically reduce data transport times, but this benefit is lost if devices and applications don't have the computing performance to process high volumes of data quickly. By deploying an SD-WAN solution at the edge of the network you move computing functions to the cloud, where resources are more scalable and can be located closer to edge devices. The same situation as autonomous vehicles applies to the healthcare industry, where remote surgeries rely on huge amounts of data being sent in real-time to perform the procedure. With this resolution in place, 5G will enable doctors to treat patients regardless of location. 

Prioritizing Application Traffic 

Utilize an SD-WAN solution to identify traffic coming through the network and prioritize critical applications. While 5G offers significantly higher speed and capacity, managing the number of sessions becomes a new struggle as more devices join the network. Through prioritization, you can ensure essential services are receiving the network power they require. You will also be able to deprioritize less desirable applications such as online gaming and video streaming services, reallocating the bandwidth to important areas of the network. Link balancers will also offer seamless path selection between multiple links from different ISPs and technologies. With an SD-WAN solution you can also easily enforce corporate policy and block sites or traffic types that interfere with the business. 

Diversify Your Network Connections

Reduce the risk of downtime by having link failure in place. Should one link go down, traffic will seamlessly move to another connection which ensures business continuity and avoids outages. When all links are working, split your sessions across all available paths. allowing users to access all available bandwidth at one time, which negates the size limitations of individual links. By deploying the proper SD-WAN solution, you can manage redundancy and ensure consistent connectivity. 

Offering Better Security in a More Connected World

5G splits network frequencies into slices, which reside on a shared infrastructure; like the cloud. As the number of network slices and user devices increase, the number of attack vectors also grow. SD-WAN inherently provides an extra layer of data security through encryption. There is also the added benefit of the ability to enable edge-to-edge security over corporate communications on the 5G network. 

While 5G hasn't arrived yet, organizations can get a head start on 5G adoption by incorporating an SD-WAN solution into their existing infrastructure. With analysts predicting more than 100 million 5G-enabled handsets will be sold in 2021, it's not too soon to get started. 

Watch a webinar on “Unleash the Power of 5G and Enhance Your SD-WAN Experience”  

*https://www.healthdatamanagement.com/opinion/how-5g-could-bring-multiple-benefits-to-healthcare 



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