MetTel’s Robert Dapkiewicz: Government Agencies Should Modernize Their Networks With SD-WAN

Robert Dapkiewicz, senior vice president and general manager of MetTel’s federal program, wrote in a commentary published Monday on Federal News Network that the COVID-19 pandemic has uncovered bandwidth gaps, highlighting the need for government agencies to modernize their enterprise voice and data network infrastructure with the adoption of software-defined wide-area network.

Dapkiewicz discussed how SD-WAN could help agencies reduce spending and achieve improved performance by supporting “high bandwidth connectivity options and management by application.”

He said SD-WAN provides IT administrators greater visibility into their networks and allows them to identify and address redundancies.

“Finally, SD-WAN can help government agencies stay ahead of the technology curve and serve as a natural step in government’s ongoing path to digital transformation,” Dapkiewicz wrote. “SD-WAN complements the ubiquity of cloud services widely used today with a dynamic and versatile architecture.”

Dapkiewicz called on agencies to consider several factors before making the transition to SD-WAN, such as testing SD-WAN through a proof of concept first before buying, examining the current network architecture and strengthen their architecture’s defenses.

“The latest SD-WAN networks use artificial intelligence and analytics to identify, report and address network incidents without human intervention,” Dapkiewicz said. “As this type of hyper automation gains traction, SD-WAN is becoming more resilient and adaptive by immediately and autonomously addressing issues as they happen, freeing IT to focus on higher skilled work.”