Small and medium-sized businesses today have access to a vast number of digital technologies and IT solutions. From communication and collaboration tools to drive workforce productivity to e-commerce platforms that make it easy for customers to find their products, even in overseas markets – the opportunities for SMBs to compete with larger enterprises are more accessible than ever before.

But digital technologies. This is where software-defined networking can help, as it offers numerous benefits for businesses over traditional networking architectures. 

How SDNs benefit small businesses

Due to the nature of its architecture, SDN offers small businesses a number of benefits including:

• Better visibility into the network
  The ability to configure the network virtually allows you to manage routing, switching and other critical tasks in the network. Through software interfaces, you are able to get a broad perspective across all network assets and monitor for potential threats and issues. 
• Ease of provisioning
  SDNs are also helpful if you are thinking of expansion and want to quickly set up office networks in new locations. For example, let’s say you want to get a new office up and running quickly, with all the essential communications tools ready to use. The centralised management of the networks makes it easy to do so. There may also be configuration templates to make it easy to install secure access communications. Instead of waiting for days or even weeks to set up the network in your new office like before, you can get everything done in a few minutes through SDN.
• Power applications without needing to modify software
  SMBs often rely on off-the-shelf software packages for their daily needs, be it for communication and collaboration, payment solutions, HR processes and invoicing. And unlike larger enterprises, they may not have dedicated teams to maintain and tweak networks to support the performance of these applications.
  
  SDN allows the network to adapt Quality of Service (QoS) policies dynamically to optimise videoconferencing applications for quality. Doing this manually can take up a lot of time, even with an in-house IT department. But with SDN, QoS profiles can be applied without needing to know the specifics of how to adjust the configurations manually, thereby providing the best network experience.

• Troubleshoot network issues efficiently 
  When things go wrong in your network, it can take up a lot of time and resources to troubleshoot, even if you have a specialist support team. Any extended delay in resolving these issues can mean downtime for the business, which in turn results in lost revenue and additional costs for the repair. With SDNs, this troubleshooting can be done more efficiently. Using information about the network visible in one location, you can narrow down to the root cause of the issues and take the necessary steps for resolution virtually.
• Reduce costs for ensuring availability
  Using traditional networking solutions, the way to ensure network availability was by having redundant servers and additional equipment, which incurred more costs. SDNs, because of their software-based approach and the ability to route traffic and switch flows in real time, allow SMBs to keep their business-critical systems running without the need for new hardware and associated costs.

How Singtel SD-WAN helps SMBs

Closely related to SDN is the concept of a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN). SD-WAN is a type of SDN that focuses on the “network edge”, which is the interface between a local network and the wider internet. SD-WAN allows you to provision wide-area networks that connect multiple locations. It can be managed by an external vendor, which frees up time for your team to focus on other critical tasks.

Singtel offers SD-WAN to give SMBs the power of a flexible and agile network that responds quickly to changing business needs. It offers SMBs all the benefits of an SDN including the reduced total cost of ownership, protection from security threats, quick rollout of new applications and support for hybrid working.

A centralised portal gives you complete visibility of all your network data traffic, applications, insights, and cloud performance while zero-touch provisioning allows for hassle-free deployment without the need for technical resources on site.