T-Systems South Africa has launched its new SD-WAN Lite solution, tailored to the changed requirements of business, which increasingly adopt a hybrid work approach that sees staff working from home-office facilities for the majority of the work week.
According to Hein Witte, Specialised Sales Executive: Telecommunications, at T-Systems South Africa, the SD-WAN Lite offering is essentially a cheaper home edition of SD-WAN, which is the new innovate corporate wide area networking architecture that is being deployed globally.
“We realised that with the need for more people to work remotely, from home or even small office environments, there is also a requirement for the same network security and accessibility that one would get when working from the office. At the same time, it is imperative that the running costs of the service be kept to the minimum. The SD-WAN Lite service is therefore adapted to enable the end-user to self-manage the connectivity.
Employees who work remotely often engage with customers, but their Internet service at home can experience some degradation in quality and even result in dropped calls.
“At the same time, businesses have a high demand for quality, so with the SD-WAN Lite offering, we are bringing our customers the ability to scale between capacity, performance and cost to fit the unique requirements of each remote office scenario.”
Witte says uptake of the offering should be particularly strong among organisations that want to continue to transact and even expedite engagement with their customer base, but have to do so remotely at an affordable price point.
“Retail and financial services verticals should put SD-WAN Lite high on the agenda, as they engage with their clients remotely on a large scale. It enables functional or business process requirements such as sales and support engagements with their clients.”
Witte says while many companies have already embarked on digital transformation journeys prior to the global pandemic, many have been on a slow adoption curve. However, the subsequent lockdown has forced a large amount of staff to work from home, needing good quality, secure connectivity.
“SD-WAN is an architecture that is able to use multiple connectivity technologies. If a user has a fibre-based Internet service at home, the SD-WAN Lite solution would leverage off the current connection, but would respectively add other connectivity technologies to it, such as LTE, and choose the best path for a particular network session,” explains Witte.
“SD-WAN Lite is unique in that it can, in an intelligent manner, leverage off different connectivity channels. This is unique at the SD-WAN Lite price point.”
Witte says the offering incorporates secure, quality business connectivity, which is required for compliance and other regulatory aspects, is priced at the consumer level, and is a robust solution as it has self-healing capabilities.
“In terms of pricing, the SD-WAN Lite offering is much cheaper than the full-blown SD-WAN solution and can be implemented on top of existing Internet-based services, hence not much new infrastructure is required, which also speeds up deployment.”
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About T-Systems: T-Systems company profile
About T-Systems South Africa: TSSA Company Profile
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