The changes over the past year have made it clear that work is no longer a place you go, but a thing you do. More than ever, users and applications are everywhere, and the new normal is here to stay. Gartner reported that 74% of CFOs intend to shift some employees to remote work permanently, even after the healthcare crisis subsides.
To enable a productive, future-ready workforce, it’s up to IT to provide secure, optimized access to the data center and cloud services for users at the branch, home, or anywhere. The branch has evolved, and the “trusted perimeter” has dissolved.
How can you ensure a frictionless, secure experience for employees working remotely? It starts with empowering them with an environment that provides the same familiar experience they would have in office. This means, easy access to the applications they need, along with consistent, always-on internet availability. Nobody wants to deal with limited bandwidth, broken and disrupted connectivity, and poor application performance.
SD-WAN was built to work from anywhere
Many companies are turning to VMware SD-WAN™ to create a foundation for today’s increasingly remote workforce. Created for today’s organizations that use resources in clouds more and more, it delivers excellent, optimized network connectivity, together with assured application performance and enterprise-class security. It’s simple to manage and operate, with centralized monitoring, analytics, and control enriched with artificial intelligence. But perhaps most importantly for today’s environment, it provides scalability, so you can easily accommodate new employees—and make working from home consumer-simple.
When offices around the world shut down, IT departments had to pivot very quickly to support millions of newly home-based workers. VMware pivoted along with our customers, shifting resources and shipping VMware SD-WAN Edge devices as fast as possible to support business continuity.
Real-world example: Finance
For example, a major financial and insurance company was already using its VMware SD-WAN solution to support 5,000 work-at-home sites. When COVID-19 began to spread, the company had to move fast to shift all its service representatives and personnel to a work-from-home model.
Working with VMware SD-WAN and QOS Networks, the company placed an order for 9,700 VMware SD-WAN Edges for their new work-from-home representatives. Within 9 business days 8,830 devices were delivered and deployed—and they were visible and accessible in the VMware SD-WAN Orchestrator.
Real-world example: Medicine
MD Anderson Cancer Center, one of the world’s largest cancer centers, faced life-or-death challenges in March 2020. To protect its staff and vulnerable patients, many employees moved offsite to remote home offices. The VMware SD-WAN team responded in record time, rolling out the first 500 VMware SD-WAN Edge 510 devices in a matter of days, with more to follow. Because the situation was urgent, VMware sent hundreds of Edge devices by priority shipping even before they received an official purchase order.
VMware SD-WAN helped MD Anderson scale up fast and kept them securely connected to their critical applications. “We deployed a combination of more than 700 VMware SD-WAN Edge 510 and VMware SD-WAN Edge 540 devices to extend the same level of user experience to the home as if our employees were working onsite,” said Emil Patel, engineering director at MD Anderson. “We are expanding our footprint to 1,000 devices as we continue expanding WFH initiatives in these difficult times of COVID-19. Thank you, Sanjay [Uppal] and the VMware team, for making our transition so seamless and successful.”
Even as the ground shifted around them, VMware SD-WAN remained a predictable, dependable solution for these organizations as they found new ways to empower their employees and serve their clients and patients.
Explore SD-WAN deployment at scale at our webinar
What happens when you suddenly have to support 80% of your users working from home? With many enterprise employees working remotely, companies need to quickly deploy a work from anywhere solution to provide people the same user and application experience as if they were in the office.
Sign up to participate in our webinar, “Large-scale SD-WAN deployment: How do you roll out 9000 edges in 9 days?” We’ll help you understand how to deploy a large number of VMware SD-WAN Edges quickly and efficiently into home environments. Our Technical Product Manager will discuss key features that enable this quick rollout, including:
• Zero-touch provisioning
• Prioritizing business-critical traffic over home traffic
• Default business policies and custom application definition
• Dynamic Multipath Optimization™
• Securing the network and locking down corporate resources
Register for our live online event, February 25 at 10:00 am Pacific time, or view it on demand.
Learn more
After you register for the webinar, visit our work from anywhere web page to find out how VMware SD-WAN can help your employees, including new pricing options.
