Associate feature: Is SD-WAN the future for public sector networks?

For those working in public sector IT, the current challenges are manifold, including decreasing budgets, staffing, moving data from in-house to the cloud, managing software as a service and increased demand for bandwidth and connectivity by staff across the sector. Add to that concerns about reliability, increased security challenges and the need to keep everything working for vital lifeline services, and the public sector tends not to be at the forefront of adopting new technologies. So, can senior IT figures from the public sector be convinced of the advantages of moving towards a new type of network that is increasing in popularity, but has yet to see widespread take-up by public bodies in Scotland? SD-WAN, or software-defined wide-area network, is a type of wide-area network – a network covering a large geographical area – that uses existing connectivity such as broadband, 4G, LTE or MPLS to connect up branch offices to the central network or data centres, whether in-house or cloud, at a distance from each other or the user.