Evaluate whether your business is ready to transition from traditional WAN to SD-WAN — current infrastructure, ISP diversity, and application needs.
SD-WAN can transform how UK businesses connect their offices and access cloud services, but a successful deployment requires careful readiness assessment. This checklist helps you evaluate your current WAN infrastructure, ISP diversity, application requirements, and organisational readiness for the transition. It identifies potential blockers and prerequisites so you can plan a smooth migration from traditional WAN to software-defined networking.
IT managers and network architects at UK businesses with multiple sites who are evaluating whether SD-WAN is the right solution for their wide area networking needs.
Readiness typically depends on having multiple sites, access to more than one internet circuit per location for failover, and a clear understanding of which applications need traffic prioritisation. Businesses still relying on a single ISP connection per site usually need to address that first before SD-WAN delivers its full benefit.
SD-WAN typically improves reliability through automatic failover between multiple connections, reduces reliance on expensive dedicated circuits like MPLS, and allows centralised, application-aware traffic prioritisation. Most UK businesses moving to SD-WAN report better performance for cloud applications, since traffic can route directly rather than backhauling through a central site.
SD-WAN generally costs less than traditional MPLS circuits since it can run over standard broadband or fibre connections rather than dedicated lines, with UK SMEs typically seeing meaningful savings per site once multiple locations are combined. Exact savings depend heavily on current MPLS contract terms and circuit count.
Key checks include current WAN infrastructure and contract end dates, availability of diverse ISP circuits at each site, application traffic patterns needing prioritisation, and how security policies will migrate to the new platform. This checklist walks through each readiness factor so migration blockers are identified before a vendor is chosen.
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