Choosing the right Managed Wi-Fi provider- Key Considerations
In today’s hyper-connected world, a stable and efficient Wi-Fi network is essential for enterprises to operate seamlessly. A robust and dependable Wi-Fi network is the foundation of success for any thriving business, facilitating seamless employee communication and offering a platform for engaging with customers.
Managed Wi-Fi providers offer a range of services, designed to make your Wi-Fi network hassle-free and optimized for performance. But how to choose the right managed Wi-Fi provider? In this article, we will explore the key factors you must evaluate when making this decision.
Understanding your core requirements
Before beginning your search for a managed Wi-Fi provider, it is crucial to understand your core requirements. It might depend on your business type, size, number of devices connecting to network, bandwidth & coverage needs, security demands, compliance, and more. Here is a list of essential features and services your potential managed Wi-Fi provider must offer.
- Performance
The foundation of successful business operations is a stable and high-performance Wi-Fi network. When evaluating managed Wi-Fi providers, prioritize reliability and speed. Downtime or slow connectivity can disrupt operations and negatively impact potential lead interactions. Ensure the provider can offer Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with guaranteed uptime and performance levels that meet your business needs.
- Scalability
One of the most critical considerations when choosing a managed Wi-Fi provider is scalability. Your network needs may change over time as your business grows or usage patterns evolve. Look out for a partner that can accommodate scaling up or down without significant disruptions. Ask potential providers about their scalability options and whether they can adapt to your future requirements.
- Reliability and Redundancy
A reliable Wi-Fi network is a non-negotiable requirement for businesses. Downtime can lead to lost revenue, frustrated customers, and decreased productivity. When evaluating managed Wi-Fi providers, inquire about their network reliability and redundancy measures. Look for providers with a track record of minimal downtime and robust failover solutions to ensure uninterrupted service.
- Security
Cybersecurity threats are constantly evolving, and your network must be protected from potential breaches and attacks. Make sure your provider offers robust security measures such as firewall protection, intrusion detection, and encryption. Additionally, inquire about their approach to security updates and patches to stay ahead of emerging threats.
- Quality of Service (QoS)
Different devices on your network may require varying levels of bandwidth and priority. For example, video conferencing and voice-over-IP (VoIP) calls demand low latency and consistent bandwidth. A managed Wi-Fi provider that offers Quality of Service (QoS) allows you to prioritize traffic according to your needs, ensuring a seamless user experience for critical applications.
- Network Management and Monitoring
Effective management and monitoring are essential for maintaining a healthy Wi-Fi network. Your managed Wi-Fi provider should offer robust tools and platforms that allows you to monitor network performance, troubleshoot issues, and make necessary adjustments. Look for providers that provide real-time visibility into your network’s status and offer proactive support to address potential problems before they impact users.
- Support and Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
Consider the level of support your managed Wi-Fi provider offers. What are their service level agreements (SLAs)? Do they provide 24/7 customer support? Can they respond quickly to network issues? Clear communication and reliable support are crucial, especially during network emergencies. Ensure that provider support offerings align with your business needs and expectations.
- Cost and Pricing Structure
Cost is undoubtedly a significant factor when choosing a managed Wi-Fi provider. Some providers might charge based on the number of devices connected, while others may have data usage-based pricing. Make sure you are aware of any potential hidden fees or overage charges and choose a pricing model that aligns with your usage patterns.
- Compatibility and Integration
Consider your existing technology infrastructure when selecting a managed Wi-Fi provider. Will the provider’s solution seamlessly integrate with your current systems, such as point-of-sale (POS) systems, security cameras, or other IoT devices? Compatibility and integration capabilities can significantly impact the efficiency and effectiveness of your network.
- Reputation and Reviews
Finally, research the reputation and customer reviews of potential managed Wi-Fi providers. Online reviews and testimonials from current clients can provide valuable insights into a provider’s performance, customer service, and overall satisfaction. Additionally, inquire about case studies or references to gain a deeper understanding of how the provider has helped businesses similar to yours.
Sify Edge Connect: One-stop Solution for your Managed Wi-Fi needs
Sify Edge Connect is a comprehensive suite of services involving Edge connect Advisory and Implementation services combined with wireless management and intelligent edge analytics. It is a fully managed secure wireless platform that integrates IT, OT, and people. Edge Connect offers a seamless expansion of its core services to edge devices while delivering centralized management for streamlined operations, infrastructure near the end-user for reduced latency, and expert management of policies for data protection.
A few salient features of Sify’s Edge Connect are:
- Cloud-based centralized management platform
- Controlled Internet access to guest users with GIS mapping
- Highly scalable and resilient
- Pan India deployment & support
- Service-based model with end-to-end ownership
Wrapping Up!
Choosing the right managed Wi-Fi provider is crucial decision that can impact your business efficiency, security, and customer satisfaction. By carefully understanding above factors, you can make an informed choice that aligns with your specific needs and goals. A well-chosen managed Wi-Fi provider will ensure a reliable wireless network and empowers you to focus on what matters most while growing your business and serving your customers.
Boost your network edge for all-round digital transformation with Sify’s Edge Connect now!
The future of enterprise networking: Exploring the benefits of SD-WAN
The conversation around networking solutions has reached a critical juncture, and software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) have become central to this discourse. The SD-WAN market is projected to reach USD 13.7 billion by 2027, growing at a compounded rate of 31.9% annually. As enterprises demand agile, built-for-purpose, future-ready, cost-effective, and secure networking solutions, SD-WAN represents a preferable alternative to the limitations of traditional networking solutions. This article delves into the transformative business benefits of SD-WAN, its advantages over traditional WAN technologies, and why enterprises must take immediate notice.
What is SD-WAN and how has it evolved?
Consider this scenario: A retail chain with stores in multiple cities, each running different promotions, handling distinct inventory, and serving diverse customer needs. How do they ensure that all of their branches communicate efficiently with the headquarters and with each other? How do they safeguard sensitive data that is exchanged over their network?
SD-WAN emerges as a game-changing solution in these contexts. It leverages software-defined networking (SDN) to establish a more agile and responsive network ecosystem. It dynamically optimizes WAN performance, delivering an exceptional user experience.
Traditional WAN vs. SD-WAN
Traditional WAN architectures offer robust stability, compatibility with legacy systems, and regulatory compliance. Through high-quality connections like MPLS, they guarantee performance where it is critical. Being a widely adopted technology, many organizations have the in-house expertise to manage them efficiently. On the other hand, they are known for their rigidity and inefficiency, often requiring a lot of manual configurations. The lack of centralized management is also a major drawback. All of this results in higher costs, poor performance and lack of scalability.
SD-WAN revolutionizes this space by offering significant WAN optimization. SD-WAN shines in its ability to offer agile, cost-effective, and scalable networking solutions with centralized management. Leveraging software-defined networking, it optimizes traffic routes, prioritizing essential applications for enhanced performance and reliability. Additionally, built-in security features, such as end-to-end encryption, fortify the network, making it an alternative to traditional WAN technologies.
Organizations adopting SD-WAN can expect to reduce networking costs while significantly improving their bandwidth. Its fast, reliable, and secure network can handle any unprecedented surge in users. Centralized management and better visibility keep diverse locations connected efficiently.
Sify’s Managed SD-WAN: Features and benefits
Sify, a recognized niche player in the Gartner Global Managed Services Magic Quadrant, offers a cutting-edge managed SD-WAN platform, developed in collaboration with top OEMs. Sify SD-WAN helps enterprises to meet the evolving network requirements with unmatched agility, security, and scale.
- Improved performance:
Superior application steering, intelligent routing and application prioritization result in accelerated performance, reduced latency, and enhanced user experience.
- Cost savings:
SD-WAN brings down hardware costs and optimizes bandwidth and network assets utilization, helping to derive the best long-term ROI.
- Simplified management:
Centralized control, policy management and automation simplify network management, reducing manual configurations and enabling efficient scaling. Management dashboards offer granular views based on business intent.
- Enhanced security:
SD-WAN security benefits include bolstered overall network security, encrypted traffic and secure connections for remote offices.
- Application awareness:
SD-WAN excels in application-aware dynamic bandwidth allocation, particularly useful in high-demand scenarios. Pre-configured SD-WAN policies can immediately identify and prioritize latency-sensitive traffic to ensure there is no degradation in quality.
- Automatic failover:
SD-WAN’s intelligent algorithms detect congestion or failure on the primary connection, and they automatically switch traffic to a secondary connection, ensuring uninterrupted user experience.
For more insights into a best-practices-driven SD-WAN implementation, click here to learn how Sify’s SD-WAN services combine robust performance with cost-effectiveness.
Emerging trends: The future of SD-WAN
SD-WAN as-a-Service: Managed SD-WAN deployments are growing rapidly, with more enterprises choosing to outsource WAN management to specialized service providers. By 2020, this number had risen to nearly 50%, from just 8% of deployments in 2017. There has been a noticeable shift towards offering SD-WAN as-a-service, with businesses able to adopt this technology without hefty upfront investments.
SD-WAN and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE): When integrated into a SASE framework, SD-WAN benefits from an additional layer of security, which makes policy-based, secure access to network resources efficient and highly secure. For example, SD-WAN enhances secure remote access by providing encrypted pathways between remote locations and central networks. To add to this point, the focus on zero-trust security models further boosts SD-WAN’s credentials as a secure networking solution, by ensuring that all traffic is verified before access to the network is granted.
SD-WAN and Cloud: Traditional WAN architectures often struggle to efficiently route cloud-bound traffic, leading to suboptimal performance and potential security risks. SD-WAN dynamically routes traffic based on application type, quality of service requirements, and network conditions. It can identify the most efficient path to a particular cloud service and optimize the route for performance, reliability, and security. Furthermore, SD-WAN solutions often have native integrations with major cloud service providers. Such “cloud on-ramp” capabilities empower SD-WAN for rapid and secure cloud access.
SD-WAN and AI: AI-driven automation is enhancing SD-WAN by enabling smarter traffic management and improved security through anomaly detection. By integrating AI and machine learning, SD-WAN becomes capable of intelligent network optimization and predictive analytics. A unified approach (often enabled by a single management console) consolidates heterogeneous networks and traffic onto a single platform for easier management and also serves as a rich source of network and security data.
SD-WAN and the Edge: SD-WAN enables near-real-time data processing and analysis at the source, reducing latency and boosting application performance. Its dynamic traffic routing capabilities also enhance efficient data handling at distributed edge locations, allowing organizations to deliver timely insights and actions.
Conclusion: Key considerations for implementing SD-WAN
SD-WAN will play a pivotal role in the next wave of digital transformation. Organizations that are considering the switch should begin by assessing their needs and choose an SD-WAN solution or a service provider who can offer the full suite of capabilities suited to these needs.
Sify delivers a managed SD-WAN platform that enables the network agility and security needed by the modern-day enterprise. Sify’s SD-WAN platform supports customers’ network needs across a multi-service provider and multi-media environment. Learn how you can empower your network with our SD-WAN services. Learn more
Exploring India’s Potential as a Preferred Hyperscale Data Center Destination
The Indian data center market has witnessed phenomenal growth in recent years, driven by the increasing adoption of digitalization, internet penetration, e-commerce and cloud computing. Due to accelerated adoption of public cloud and data sovereignty policies, major global players are investing heavily in hyper-scale facilities, turning the nation into a hyperscale data center hub to meet the increasing demand of cloud services.
According to a report, the data center industry in India to cross 1.3 GW capacity and grow 2.4x by 2024. The hyperscale market is expected to grow 20% from 2021 to 2026, with over 300 new hyperscale sites in development globally today, that number is expected to surpass 1,000 by end of 2024.
Hyperscale Data Center Colocation Providers in India are Revolutionizing Data Center Infrastructure:
Having a data center in India has its own benefits. Several prominent data center providers have already made significant investments in data centers that offer massive colocation facilities, capable of housing high-performing servers and storage systems, providing immense computing power, storage capacity, and scalability. These data centers cater to all the needs of Public Cloud providers, global Enterprises, and OTT players, who require massive infrastructure to support their digital services and handle the exponential growth of data.
Let’s explore the reasons why India is an attractive destination for hyperscale Data Centers
- Vast market size and growing digital economy
The proliferation of data generation at edge, vast market size with favorable business environment, and India’s rapidly expanding digital economy, fuelled by the government’s Digital India initiative is making India- one of the main data centers destinations in the world. Policies aimed at data localization and data sovereignty has incentivized both domestic and international CSPs to establish hyperscale data centers in India to comply with these regulations.
- Increased adoption of cloud services in India
The increase in cloud services adoption in India reflects a broader trend of digitalization and technology-driven innovation. As organizations continue to realize the benefits of cloud computing, India is poised to play a pivotal role in the global cloud services landscape.
Cloud-born startups and automation-dependent businesses are defining the growth and scale of data center services. For instance, hybrid cloud adoption is enabling digital enterprises to leverage private infrastructure for compliance, sensitive workloads, greater control on the applications and environment, and tap into the high computing power of public clouds for bursting or scaling requirements, enabling digital innovation, and easier access to next-gen technologies like AI/ML, thus accommodating evolving business needs.
- Scalable data center campuses with growth options for up to 10 years
Scalability is one of the top challenges that hyperscalers and enterprises face as the demands on their technology systems increases. To help customers data processing seamlessly, hyperscale companies need exceptional storage, capacity, and flexibility to match their internal data processing requirements.
Hyperscale-ready data centers facilities in India are designed to become agile to cater the growing demand and meet any load they service. By setting up new availability zones set up and built-to-suit capabilities, most data center providers offer growth options for up to 10 years, enabling faster time to market in a cost-effective manner.
Sify’s data center in Rabale, Mumbai is an expandable mega data center campus designed for 10 towers, with 5 of them fully operational. The large campus has a 200 MW IT power capacity with up to 15,000+ racks. The remaining towers are in development and planning phase to favor hyperscale and retail clients’ dynamic workloads.
- Dense interconnect networks
The availability of dense interconnect networks has played a significant role in contributing to the growth of data centers in India. Hyperscale data center providers help businesses seamlessly connect to public clouds through high speed, low latency network while ensuring enhanced quality of services (QoS), secured information exchange, and guaranteed performance.
- Ample Stable power
The rapid growth of data center usage results in a growth of energy needs of the facility. Hyperscalers look for locations with access to stable and redundant power infrastructure, including multiple power grids, reliable electrical connections, and backup generators. India hosts several locations across its geographical reach that offers ample power and the capacity to scale up as hyperscalers’ operations expand. Data center providers assess the availability of power grids, transmission lines, and substations in the vicinity to attract and meet hyperscalers core requirements.
- Abundant Renewable Energy Potential
India offers substantial renewable energy potential, including solar and wind power. The country’s focus on renewable energy development aligns with the sustainability goals of hyperscale data center operators which is to make themselves carbon-neutral, making India an attractive choice for establishing environmentally friendly data centers. Most data center service providers in India are investing in green practices to meet the sustainability guidelines.
Sify data centers are green and energy-efficient data centers with 200+ MW of renewable power contracted. Additional nation-wide Green power for upcoming Data Center facilities is underway. With a reduction in carbon footprint by 28% during 2021-22, Sify ensures implementation of innovative practices to achieve low PUE (ASHRAE guidelines) and low WUE (Green Grid guidelines). It is a significant commitment to dedicated solar and wind renewable investment.
- Skilled Workforce and Technological Expertise
India has a large pool of skilled Data Center professionals with deep Subject matter expertise in electrical, mechanical and Data Center design as well as operations. India has traditionally been strong in developing IT professionals, with a strong foundation in software development, network engineering, and data management. This talent pool is critical for operating and managing hyperscale data centers. The presence of a thriving IT services industry further contributes to the availability of skilled personnel with the necessary expertise.
- Cost Advantages
India offers several cost advantages in terms of real estate, labor, and operational expenses compared to other established data center destinations. Lower land and construction costs, competitive energy prices, and ease of business driven by government support and diverse favoring policies contribute to the cost-effectiveness of establishing hyperscale data centers in India.
- Strategic Geographical Location
India’s geographic location provides a strategic advantage for international organizations seeking to expand their data center footprint. Its proximity to emerging markets in the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East, and Africa makes India an ideal hub for serving these markets with low-latency connectivity. Hyperscale computing companies in India can act as gateways to these regions, facilitating faster data transmission and ensuring enhanced user experience.
The Mumbai subsea cable landing station serves as a key entry point for international internet traffic and facilitates high-speed connectivity to and from India. It supports global data communication and is vital for businesses and enterprises requiring robust international connectivity.
Chennai’s location along the Bay of Bengal makes it an ideal location for subsea cable landing stations. It serves as a critical gateway for international data traffic, enabling data transfer between India and other parts of the world. This connectivity is crucial for businesses, content delivery networks, and cloud service providers operating in India.
Sify data centers in Mumbai, Chennai, Noida (Delhi-NCR), Hyderabad, Kolkata, and Bangalore are strategically positioned to meet the unique needs of businesses and organizations in these expanding regions. They play a critical role in supporting government initiatives, digital transformation efforts, technological innovation, and data-driven operations.
Wrapping up!
India possesses numerous attributes that make it an attractive data center powerhouse. The country has witnessed massive infrastructure investments in the past years from International and domestic companies who recognized the potential of India as a strategic location to establish their hyperscale infrastructure. Keeping these investments and key factors in consideration, it can be assumed that in the future, the hyperscalers will invest more in India while focusing on the sustainability standards.
As India’s first commercial data center provider, Sify encompasses an extensive infrastructure with 11 DCs PAN India with 100 MW capacity. Additionally, with an aim to add 350 MW to their infrastructure by 2025, Sify will capture a large portion of the market hosting a mix of hyperscalers and retail clients.
Know more about Sify Hyperscale data centers here!!
