How to Connect Multiple Office Locations
As businesses grow across cities and countries, connecting offices securely and reliably becomes critical. This guide compares the main approaches and how to choose between them.
Site-to-site VPN
VPNs build encrypted tunnels over the public internet. They are inexpensive and quick to deploy, making them a good fit for smaller sites. The trade-off is that performance depends on unpredictable internet quality.
MPLS
MPLS delivers private, predictable performance with strong quality-of-service guarantees, which suits latency-sensitive applications. It is more expensive and slower to provision than internet-based options.
SD-WAN
SD-WAN intelligently combines multiple links — fibre, LTE, broadband — and steers traffic based on real-time conditions. It offers the resilience and performance of private networks with more flexibility and often lower cost, and is increasingly the default for multi-site enterprises.
Design for redundancy
Whatever transport you choose, give critical sites a second, independent link. Automatic failover keeps offices online when a primary connection fails.
Key Takeaways
- VPNs are cheap and fast to deploy but depend on the internet.
- MPLS offers predictable performance at a premium.
- SD-WAN blends links for resilience and flexibility.
- Always give critical sites a redundant link.
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