KENYA – Leading pan-African ICT service provider SEACOM is expanding to bring its software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) services to Kenyan businesses, offering reduced connectivity costs, increased security, agility, and local support to customers.
SEACOM’s experience with ICT infrastructure in Africa is extensive; the company launched Africa’s first broadband submarine cable system in 2009 and provides continent-wide secure Internet. It also offers a full suite of communications and cloud solutions that enable the growth of Africa’s digital economy.
Their new SD-WAN services are now available to Kenyan businesses.
The addition of managed SD-WAN to SEACOM’s services is great news for Kenyan businesses and 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 so with data traffic sure to increase exponentially over time, having a future-ready network solution has become a business imperative.
For businesses digitizing their operations, network security is another growing concern. 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.
SD-WAN is an adaptable network solution that solves these problems and meets modern network requirements.
The benefits of SD-WAN
SD-WAN allows businesses to transform their business networks into smart, intelligent, and cloud-ready networks as it simplifies the management and operation of an enterprise’s networks by using centralized software to control the connections and services between data centers, computers, and cloud-based servers.
“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”
Tonny Tugee – Managing Director, SEACOM East and North East Africa
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 the business transformation and business continuity, SD-WAN can help.”
Network administrators can use SD-WAN to optimize bandwidth usage by dynamically routing different kinds of traffic through different transport routes to reduce usage costs, improve application efficiency, and strengthen network security.
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.
With SD-WAN, businesses 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.
With traditional network solutions, data traffic would usually have to be hauled to a data center 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-premises data centers, public or private clouds, or SaaS platforms, so businesses can expect improved speed and also offers real-time visibility into application traffic and performance to ensure session quality of business-critical applications.
Tonny says that in delivering SD-WAN solutions, SEACOM has partnered with leading global organizations to provide Kenyan customers with modern and secure networking capabilities.
“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.”
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