MetTel on Tuesday took the wraps off of its SD-M service, which was designed to bring some of the benefits of SD-WAN to mobile workforces. SD-M provides actionable insight and control of factors impacting performance, costs and security of mobility usage by an enterprise's workforce.
According to MetTel, its offering benefits the enterprise along the same lines as SD-WAN by offering similar software-defined functionalities on mobile cellular networks. SD-M can operate across multiple mobile network providers used by businesses, and can be added as a feature to any device provisioned by MetTel.
“Enterprises spend approximately $124 billion per year securing their IT," said MetTel's Max Silber, vice president of mobility and IoT, in a statement. “But the minute an employee leaves their PC to work off their smartphone, they leave all that protection behind and risk corporate data to hackers and malware. Placing that employee’s device into a protective SD-M private cloud extends the benefits of the corporate network to the mobile workforce.”
By analyzing and securing mobile Internet traffic patterns on browsers, applications or mobile hotspot provisioned by MetTel, SD-M informs the enterprise what types of Internet services the company is paying for. Using SD-M, the company can make policy changes based on the analysis of current data usage, taking actions such as blocking unwanted traffic, reducing data usage or proactively adapting usage to save on data plans.
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MetTel spent about a year on the development of SD-M, which included optimizing mobile traffic routing and creating the network-based security parameters. On the software-defined front, it has the ability to define what traffic can run and at what priority level across both the SIM level and device level of a network.
It can also help enterprises with compliance risks across verticals such as healthcare, retail and government as mobile workers typically take their enterprise access with them wherever they go. While IT departments spend time and energy protecting the corporate network, mobile device traffic is usually left uncontrolled.
In order to close those gaps, SD-M can implement, update or enforce data security policies on traffic from a browser or application. SD-M has been deployed by field-based organizations with end users that work from or are in remote locations most of the time. MetTel said that emergency responders were among the first adopters of SD-M.