Picture a car park. Your local networks are the everyday spaces where devices connect, data flows, and people get on with their jobs. Your firewalls are the barriers on the way in, keeping security in check. But what about the approach roads in and out? They’re your wide area network (WAN). It’s the system that links different offices, cloud platforms, and data centres into one cohesive enterprise environment.
Just as potholes, traffic jams, or poor road layouts can cause chaos for drivers, cracks in your WAN setup can slow down operations, compromise security, and drive up costs. That’s why auditing your WAN is every bit as important as auditing your local area network (LAN). Done thoroughly, it provides the insight needed to design a smarter, more resilient WAN network architecture – one that connects your people, places, and platforms securely and seamlessly, wherever they are.
Here, we unpack what a WAN audit involves, explain the advantages of wide area network reviews, and share the strategic benefits for businesses planning everything from everyday optimisation to complex SD-WAN migrations.
Why audit your wide area network?
A WAN isn’t just ‘the internet’. It’s the fabric that holds together your enterprise, connecting multiple sites, cloud resources, and users across cities, countries, or even continents. An example of a wide area network might be a business with offices in Leeds, Manchester, and London, all tied together via private multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) circuits and secured internet links.
The features of a wide area network – such as easy scalability, centralised management, and multi-site connectivity – are powerful, but only if the network is designed and maintained properly. Without an audit, blind spots creep in. Outdated circuits, inconsistent security policies, inefficient routing, or spiralling wide area network costs can quickly cripple a business.
A WAN audit acts like a health check, surfacing what you have, how it’s performing, and what needs to change. More than merely fixing today’s problems, it helps to futureproof for digital transformation, flexible working, and cloud adoption – along with anything else that gets thrown your business’s way.
The WAN audit checklist
Here’s what a typical WAN audit covers – and why it matters:
1. Confirm locations and site roles
Are you connecting three offices or 30? A small branch office with admin staff has very different needs from a manufacturing hub with specialist engineers and large-scale machinery. Auditing site size and function ensures bandwidth, security, and connectivity are rightsized for each location.
Strategic benefit: Tailored WAN network design reduces waste, controls costs, and avoids one-size-fits-all solutions that aren’t optimised for your business.
2. Review existing circuits and bandwidth
From MPLS to broadband and leased lines, every circuit should be mapped and measured. How much capacity do you have today, and is it keeping up with demand?
Strategic benefit: Optimising bandwidth ensures critical applications don’t stall, while also keeping wide area network costs under control.
3. Check tunnelling and overlay technologies
Are you using internet protocol security (IPsec) tunnels, virtual private networks (VPNs), or software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) overlays? These determine how traffic flows between sites and to the cloud.
Strategic benefit: Understanding the overlay makes it possible to simplify, consolidate, and move towards smarter network architectures. With SD-WAN design, policy-driven security keeps your business agile while minimising risk across your entire cloud estate.
4. Assess connectivity to shared resources
Cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud are now core to enterprise IT. Your WAN needs to support reliable, secure access to these services, alongside any on-premise data centres, without a hitch.
Strategic benefit: Improves productivity and user experience by minimising latency and bottlenecks to critical business systems.
5. Map topology and intersite links
Is your WAN structured as hub-and-spoke, any-to-any, or a hybrid of both? Are there point-to-point links between sites? Each topology brings trade-offs in performance, resilience, and cost, so it’s important to make sure it’s aligned to your specific application and security needs.
Strategic benefit: Enables smarter WAN network troubleshooting and redesign for better resiliency and scalability.
6. Examine private underlays and third-party access
MPLS, internet VPNs, partner connections – who’s plugged into your network, and how? Understanding underlays and external access points is vital to secure design. This should be a non-negotiable in any setting, not least in highly regulated sectors such as healthcare and finance.
Strategic benefit: Reduces vulnerabilities and strengthens endpoint security against potential breaches.
7. Identify latency-sensitive traffic
Voice, video, and mission-critical apps can’t afford jitter or delay. Whether you’re a healthcare provider relying on real-time imaging or a finance leader keeping control systems instant, a WAN audit pinpoints how this traffic is being prioritised right now, to deliver performance gains for uncompromised connectivity.
Strategic benefit: Guarantees quality of service for collaboration, communications, and business-critical workloads.
8. Draw the big picture
After the audit, we don’t hand you numbers to decipher alone – we show you the full state of play. A high-level diagram lays out exactly how sites, clouds, circuits, overlays, and data flows connect. You’ll see the strengths, the weak spots, and where the bottlenecks are hiding. From there, it’s decision time: maybe it’s a tweak of the dials, maybe it’s a full rebuild. Either way, you’ve got the roadmap to build confidently for the future. And don’t worry, with our network design and deployment expertise, we’ve got that covered too.
Strategic benefit: Provides the blueprint for strategic upgrades, including a smooth move to SD-WAN network architecture and intelligent SD-Access.
The advantages of wide area network audits
By systematically reviewing each part of the WAN, businesses can:
Lower wide area network costs through smarter use of circuits and bandwidth
Strengthen security by identifying vulnerabilities and external access points
Improve resilience with topology designs suited to business needs
Enhance user experience by optimising latency and application performance
Build a scalable platform for future technologies like SD-WAN management
In other words, auditing is not a technical tick-box exercise. It’s the first step in aligning your IT infrastructure with your business goals and reaping maximum ROI from your technology investments.
From audit to action: designing for what’s next
Once you understand today’s reality, you can design for tomorrow. Whether that means streamlining circuits, making redundancies, or transitioning to a modern enterprise SD-WAN solution, your audit is the springboard.
For many organisations, that future is SD-WAN. Offering application-aware routing, simplified management, and cost savings over traditional MPLS wide area networks, SD-WAN is a powerful enabler of cloud-first strategies. But without a clear picture of your current setup, even the best SD-WAN network architecture risks being built on shaky ground.
