How A Wide Area Network Can Help Your Business

If your company operates from several different sites, you should consider getting a Wide Area Network (or WAN for short).

We provide WANs to many UK businesses and our MPLS WAN Pricing tool has been used by many thousands of organisations.

Here are the main reasons our customers decide to get a Wide Area Network:

A Wide Area Network Lets You Centralise Your IT Infrastructure

This means you won't have to buy an email server or file server for each office.

You just have one of each at Head Office (or in a data centre) and let users at each site access it via the corporate WAN.

This simplifies the management of your servers (by reducing the number you need to support, back-up, host and physically protect).

You also get economies of scale from operating a central pool of IT resources that is shared by all your sites. For example, if all your server infrastructure is in one place, it's relatively easy to add an enterprise-class Storage Area Network.

A Corporate WAN Can Send Confidential Data Between Your Main Sites Without It Travelling Over The Internet

A wide area network can securely transmit emails, data and phone calls between your sites.

Your WAN can encrypt your data, ensuring that no-one can snoop on your confidential business information.

Your Wide Area Network can send data between your sites without it once touching the Internet.

Given the commercial sensitivity of many emails, spreadsheets and presentations, this added security is desirable.

Wide Area Networks Usually Offer More Bandwidth Than Broadband Connections

Corporate Wide Area Networks are usually made up of leased lines, not broadband connections. So they typically offer higher upload speeds than standard broadband connections.

Corporate WANs usually have unlimited monthly data transfer limits. In other words, you can use the links as much as you like.

WANs Can Carry Your Phone Calls, Saving You Money You Would Otherwise Have To Spent Renting ISDN Circuits

Why spend money on expensive ISDN circuits, when you could send those phone calls over your corporate WAN instead?

As long as your WAN provider can prioritise 'voice traffic', you're unlikely to notice any difference in call quality. But you WILL notice the difference in your bill. Not only will you eliminate some (or all) of your ISDN circuit rental charges, you're also likely to benefit from cheaper call rates.

If you'd like to switch over gradually, you can choose a hybrid approach, where you keep your ISDN circuits in place, have inbound calls come in over ISDN, and have your outbound calls go out over the WAN. This won't save you any money on the ISDN circuits, but you may at least get cheaper calls. Some Wide Area Network providers can configure the system so that if your data connection goes down, outbound calls will be routed over your ISDN circuits temporarily.

WANs Come With Business-Class Support

Most Wide Area Networks come with Service Level Agreements guaranteeing you a specific amount of uptime. Support may be available 24x7, not just in business hours.

Corporate WAN Pricing

Find out how much a Wide Area Network would cost by visiting our free WAN pricing tool.