It is one thing to consider SD-WAN for your business (like almost 80% of all medium to enterprise companies are doing right now) — it is another to be completely READY for SD-WAN!  To date, there has really been no defined standard for readiness and any consulting process should provide documentation that allows clients to move forward with an efficient roadmap to networking success.

In meeting with over 75 companies in the past 6 months while working with every major carrier and SD-WAN provider in the U.S., we have been able to build a SD-WAN/Network ASSESSMENT FRAMEWORK.

The Xcelocloud SD-WAN Assessment Framework (XSAF) ultimately saves companies time, money and resources. This consulting process provides documentation to ensure your migration to SD-WAN is successful, with the right partner/provider selected, at the right cost, implemented efficiently and potentially even managed effectively along with your network!

As a starting point, we typically ask decision makers to go to www.xcelocloud.com/xsaf/ and take the initial SD-WAN Readiness Assessment (light) – which will give you a % score for Xcelocloud to begin to build out next steps with you.  Then we use the most comprehensive evaluation process in the industry to assess your current and desired state in our XSAF PHASE 1.  We measure the following:

  1. Goals Assessment

This is a critical step in the XSAF assessment framework. As a technology partner to your business, we must ensure we understand your long and short-term goals.

  1. Technical Readiness Assessment

SD-WAN can be a valuable tool for impacting business benefits at your company. However, implementations are often complicated and require a solid understanding of your technical readiness to deploy SD-WAN.

  1. Operational Readiness

Your business and your business partners globally rely on your network to deliver corporate applications. We cannot affect day to day operations of your team and must calculate the operational readiness of your organization to deploy SD-WAN.

  1. Management Readiness

In many organizations, management of critical infrastructure is already challenging. When introducing SD-WAN and multiple management options, we must calculate the management readiness of your organization to effectively and efficiently manage the SD-WAN solution.

  1. Implementation Readiness

Implementation of the best SD-WAN solution for your company means we have to have the successful completion of the businesses due diligence and understanding of your current and future strategy.

  1. Gap Assessment and Readiness

As goals are a critical step in starting this assessment, Gap reviews and remediation is a critical step in closing Readiness (Phase 1) and preparing to start Selection (Phase 2).

CURRENT EXAMPLE:

legacy architecture

NEXT GEN EXAMPLE:

sd-wan architecture figure

For more information, please go to www.xcelocloud.com/xsaf/ to take the survey and get started with the Executive Director in your area!