Tonny Tugee, Seacom Managing Director: East and North East Africa.

Seacom has announced its intention to roll out software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) services in Kenya with the aim to help businesses bolster their networking capability and capacity.

The company says the services offer support for business networks that are under pressure and benefits include reduced connectivity costs, increased security, agility, and local support to customers.

“With the increased global adoption of cloud applications, mobile workforces, and voice and video communications becoming the new norm, traditional networks have been placed under significant pressure to meet increasing demands. Using a legacy network solution can easily lead to exorbitant transport costs, poor end-user experience, security vulnerabilities, and unsuitable management capabilities. With data traffic sure to increase exponentially over time, having a future-ready network solution has become a business imperative,” Seacom states.

The company claims that network security remains a concern, especially for businesses that are digitising their operations.

In 2020, according to research in the form of the PwC Kenya Economic Crime and Fraud Survey, the increase in adoption of technology across various industries made business networks a target and attacks on systems have become more sophisticated.

Seacom echoes this and says cyberattacks are becoming more widespread and advanced, but upgrading hardware-based firewalls across various branches can easily become unmanageable and costly.

“Traditional networks also have limited visibility and control over network access, which necessitates a more modern approach to network security,” the company adds.

It argues that SD-WAN is an adaptable network solution that solves these problems and meets modern network requirements.

Transformation

“SD-WAN allows businesses to transform their business networks into smart, intelligent, and cloud-ready networks. It simplifies the management and operation of an enterprise’s networks by using centralised software to control the connections and services between datacentres, computers, and cloud-based servers,” Seacom continues.

Tonny Tugee, Managing Director at Seacom East and North East Africa, explains, “If you want to create more resilient branch networking operations, dynamically adjust to changing conditions, and empower business transformation and business continuity, SD-WAN can help.”

Network administrators can use SD-WAN to optimise bandwidth usage by dynamically routing different kinds of traffic through different transport routes to reduce usage costs, improve application efficiency, and strengthen network security.

The company says using multiple internet services from different providers improves connectivity resilience, but managing all of the different services and last-mile technologies in a wider business network is challenging.

According to Seacom, with SD-WAN, business have the flexibility to use dynamic rulesets that route certain data traffic through either cheaper or more reliable transport routes. During network failures or downtime, it can also ensure that traffic is automatically rerouted so that businesses don’t experience the negative effects of a break in connectivity.

The company says with traditional network solutions, data traffic would usually have to be hauled to a datacentre for security filtering before it can be routed to the cloud, slowing down application performance.

“SD-WAN is designed for applications hosted in different environments, including on-premise datacentres, public or private clouds, or SaaS platforms, so businesses can expect improved speed. It also offers real-time visibility into application traffic and performance to ensure session quality of business-critical applications,” Seacom states.

Tugee adds: “We understand that customer requirements are unique; instead of offering a one-size-fits-all solution, our team will look at a business’s existing infrastructure and apply the best vendor to address the customer problem.”