SD-WAN for Small Business: What You Need to Know
SD-WAN was built for enterprises but is increasingly accessible to small businesses. Learn what it offers and whether your company needs it.
Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) has revolutionized how businesses connect their offices, remote workers, and cloud applications. Once exclusively an enterprise technology, SD-WAN solutions are now available at price points that make sense for small and mid-sized US businesses with multiple locations or significant cloud application usage.
What SD-WAN Actually Does
Traditional WANs rely on expensive MPLS circuits to connect business locations. SD-WAN overlays intelligent software on top of cheaper connections — broadband internet, LTE/5G, and existing MPLS links — to create a unified, optimized network. The software makes real-time decisions about which path to send traffic on based on application requirements, link quality, and business policies.
Think of it this way: instead of one expensive highway between your offices, SD-WAN gives you multiple roads and a smart GPS that constantly reroutes traffic to avoid congestion, construction, and closures.
Benefits for Small Businesses
- Cost reduction — Replace or augment expensive MPLS with broadband internet connections at a fraction of the cost
- Improved cloud performance — Direct internet breakout for cloud apps like Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and AWS instead of backhauling through a central data center
- Automatic failover — If one internet connection fails, traffic seamlessly shifts to another with no manual intervention
- Simplified management — Cloud-based dashboards let you configure and monitor all locations from one place
- Built-in security — Many SD-WAN solutions include firewall, IPS, and secure web gateway features
When SD-WAN Makes Sense
SD-WAN typically becomes worthwhile when your business has two or more physical locations that need to communicate, you're spending heavily on MPLS or dedicated circuits, your employees rely on cloud-based applications, or you need reliable connectivity with automatic failover. A single-location business with one internet connection won't benefit from SD-WAN.
Accessible Solutions
Vendors like Meraki (Cisco), Peplink, and Fortinet offer SD-WAN solutions that scale down to small deployments. Meraki's MX series combines SD-WAN with security appliance functionality and cloud management. Peplink's SpeedFusion technology provides excellent multi-WAN bonding at competitive prices. Monthly costs for a small business deployment with two to five sites typically range from $200 to $800 per site, depending on the vendor and features.