3 Steps to Align Your Team at the Start of your SD-WAN Project

Though you may be approaching SD-WAN with great anticipation, the old adage, ‘fail to prepare, prepare to fail’ has never been more relevant.

Embarking on an SD-WAN project can be a complex process that requires a great deal of forward planning. With countless technical and resourcing considerations, companies who don’t fully prepare their teams before kick-off open themselves up to all manner of risks: stakeholder misalignment, project back-tracking, overruns, unrealized business benefits, and reduced time to value, to name but a few.

To fully prepare and align your teams before starting out on your SD-WAN journey, here are three key steps we advise you to take:

1 – Speak the same language

If you’re currently in the investigatory stage of SD-WAN, we know it can often feel like you’re learning a new language. To help accelerate the learning of your team members and advancement of your SD-WAN project, an excellent place to start is to learn common SD-WAN vocabulary.

In the below webinar, we explain the six the most important SD-WAN terms associated with the Aruba Silver Peak EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform, the technology that powers Teneo’s SD-WAN services.

This includes:

• SASE (Secure Access Service Edge)
• Business Intent Overlays
• Application Visibility & Control
• WAN Optimization – and why it’s still relevant
• Forward Error Correction
• Packet Order Correction

Watch the video and share with your team to gain a collective knowledge of the SD-WAN building blocks that will help fast-track your SD-WAN and SASE initiatives.

2 – Understand what automation looks like 

Managing application performance across today’s networks without automation is fast becoming impossible. Limiting manual network management intervention by your IT team is therefore an important mitigation measure that can be achieved by developing a better understanding of how to automate application rules.

Not only does this allow IT teams to build out an SD-WAN infrastructure that’s fit for the future, but it also frees up valuable time and resources that can be better applied to analyzing SD-WAN insights. This helps to drive better, more informed decision-making.

When it comes to understanding what automation actually looks like in SD-WAN, there’s no better place to start than the SD-WAN central management console. With Teneo’s SD-WAN services, powered by Aruba, businesses can take advantage of the Aruba Orchestrator, which provides centralized SD-WAN management and complete visibility and control of the WAN. It will also help you automatically assign application and security policies across 100s or 1000s of sites, including automated orchestration with cloud security services.

The below video explores three key questions we’re often asked about managing SD-WAN networks, providing a quick demo of the Aruba Orchestrator’s key functionality and automation controls.

This includes:

• How lean IT teams can leverage the Aruba Orchestrator and automation to manage global networks
• How to identify and drill down into problems on links
• How to access data about link utilization to ensure value for money

Watch the video and share it with your team to gain a quick overview of how the Aruba Orchestrator addresses these common questions.

3 – Set up for knowledge transfer

Many IT teams often overlook their resourcing strategy at the beginning of their SD-WAN project. Designing, deploying, and managing SD-WAN requires knowledge, skills, and experience that many teams don’t have in-house.

It’s not uncommon for IT teams to invest millions of dollars in market-leading tools that no one in the business knows how to utilize properly.

By working with Teneo as your SD-WAN managed service partner, you can utilize our years of experience and team of seasoned experts without the need to scale your in-house team. As well as guiding you through the process with our well-oiled methodology, we’ll also help train and develop your internal staff through knowledge transfer.

And, should you want to manage the solution in-house in the future, we can gradually transfer management responsibilities back to the in-house team while ensuring business continuity.

Talk to Teneo about our SD-WAN knowledge transfer.

So, it pays to be prepared before getting the ball rolling with your SD-WAN project. Get up to speed with the language, understand how automation works, and select an SD-WAN partner that commits to transferring knowledge and skills to your in-house team. Only then can you ensure you start your SD-WAN journey on the right foot.

Find out more about Teneo’s full suite of SD-WAN services