The trend lines are clear: SaaS (software as a service) is here to stay, and it’s only poised to grow further in the future. With SaaS adoption rates now at 79 percent among businesses, moving your enterprise applications into the cloud seems like less of a possibility and more of an inevitability.
If you’re looking to adopt SaaS or increase its saturation at your organization, first realize that this won’t occur in a vacuum. The excess demand SaaS requires must be countered by modern networking technology that’s designed from the ground up to maintain the reliability and quality of connections. In order to prepare for the changes brought by SaaS and the cloud, IT strategists must take a serious look at SD-WAN (software-defined wide-area network).
The Benefits and Challenges of SaaS
At this stage, the advantages of SaaS hardly need to be discussed: greater flexibility and choice, reduced IT costs, and fewer administrative challenges among them. The benefits of SaaS are so obvious, in fact, that 73 percent of organizations say that “nearly all” their applications will be SaaS by 2020.
For better and for worse, SaaS is now the standard option for enterprise application delivery. Yet the growth in SaaS hasn’t always been met by a growth in the infrastructure needed to cope with the resulting increase in network activity.
Older technologies such as WANs (wide area networks) are no longer sufficient for the modern SaaS-enabled workforce. As data stops flowing to and from the data center and starts flowing over the internet, congestion, packet loss and high latencies are all too common. As a result, end users in distributed enterprises or branch offices suffer delays and poor user experience.
Why SD-WAN Is the Right Choice for SaaS
In the face of these challenges, SD-WAN is proving to be a powerful choice for enterprises and IT teams who require high performance, availability and reliability from their SaaS deployments. Rather than needing to backhaul traffic to the data center, which can be costly in terms of transport and response time, SD-WAN can identify and offload internet and cloud traffic to ensure consistent, continuous SaaS reliability, even when network links fail. Intelligent SD-WAN agents can analyze the network in real time to find the optimal branch links and exit points for a given SaaS application — and then direct traffic along these routes.
Not only does it ensure reliability and quality for SaaS applications, SD-WAN can provide IT administrators with the security and control that they need for their data. Equipped with a state-of-the-art firewall, the best SD-WAN solutions can identify thousands of applications on the network and simplify the process of defining configurations and policies for each one.
Explore the power of SD-WAN for SaaS with Enterprise Cloud News and Citrix
Whether you currently plan to increase your adoption of SaaS and cloud services or you’re struggling to improve your SaaS reliability and performance in the face of legacy technology, you owe it to yourself to investigate options such as SD-WAN. By strategically leveraging SD-WAN as part of your cloud roadmap, you can preserve the reliability of your connections while lowering the cost of access.
To learn more about how SD-WAN can bring major benefits to your SaaS deployments, join us for an exclusive on-demand webinar with Enterprise Cloud News and Citrix, “How SD-WAN Ensures Reliability & Quality for Your SaaS Applications.”
