How Leading MSPs Stay Resilient with Multiple SD-WAN Solutions

Written by Netsurion Guest Blogger
July 26, 2019

Redundancy of connections and redundancy of routes to a colocation and/or cloud app are good strategies. Then shouldn’t vendor redundancy be a good strategy, as well?

Is it a good idea to work with only one vendor? Wouldn’t make sense to have more than one vendor? Or is platform standardization the best practice?

Redundancy of connections and redundancy of routes to a colocation and/or cloud app are good strategies. Then shouldn’t vendor redundancy be a good strategy, as well? A single vendor could be a single point of failure! Some airlines operate both Airbus and Boeing airplanes, while others standardize to a single make. Training two separate teams with two distinct platforms to offer similar services is not an appealing proposition at first, but when you think twice about it, it makes sense: It offers advantages to the MSP. It would require training a second team on a second multi-tenant platform, but the advantages are many.

With two SD-WAN vendors:

MSPs can negotiate better terms.
MSPs can offer options to their clients.
MSPs can design networks with dual vendors, based on use cases (for example, one vendor for large branches and another vendor for small branches and IoT applications).
No single point of failure:
- A major hit to a vendor’s brand reputation due to a major bug, vulnerability or service failure won’t prevent the MSP from selling and managing a similar, but likely better solution.
- If one vendor gets acquired and its multi-tenant platform is replaced by the acquirer’s, the MSP will still be able to offer and manage the solution of the second vendor while the affected team is retrained.

The moral of the story for MSPs is: It pays not to put all of your eggs in one basket. Diversify access to the internet at the branches to ensure always-on connectivity. Diversify routes to the colocation and cloud services with site-to-site VPN meshing to ensure secure connectivity to the critical business apps. Diversify vendors to minimize risk and offer alternatives. Risk reduction requires layered redundancies. If you were an airline, you wouldn’t want to fly a fleet of only Boeing 737 Max these days, would you?

The Netsurion Partner Program is a game changer, designed specifically to empower VARs, sales agents and MSP/MSSP organizations to meet the growing connectivity demands of customers, while generating new revenue streams without the risk of additional overhead costs.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.