Local Authorities (LAs) usually consist of geographically dispersed sites across a town or region, where users have independent connections to each site and access to a range of applications (i.e. both local and in the cloud) that require a consistent quality of service in order to connect to resources, share data across the different sites and connect back to the main office buildings. As each of these sites requires substantial bandwidth, traditional SD-WAN simply cannot keep up with expanding cloud-based performance needs across an extended council infrastructure. Furthermore, LAs are currently facing challenges regarding the price and flexibility of traditional SD-WAN. Some of the specific SD-WAN issues that all LAs must contend with include:
High total cost of ownership (TCO).
Lengthy provisioning cycles.
Performance degradation with the growth of cloud traffic.
Inadequate redundancy and resiliency.
Lack of application-aware connectivity.
Secure connectivity considering the ever-increasing PSN, PCI, GDPR and Prevent requirements.
