The WAN Summit New York brought together buyers and sellers of enterprise network services on April 5-6, 2016. Through case studies, panel sessions and roundtable discussions, the conference addressed some of the most pressing questions for those working in international enterprise networks. With these discussions fresh in his mind, Ciaran Roche, Co-Founder and CTO of Coevolve, who moderated the panel "After MPLS — Experiences and Lessons from Moving Traffic to the Internet," highlighted his top five takeaways from the WAN Summit New York.
This year’s WAN Summit New York just wrapped up last week, with many great presentations and panel discussions over two days. Here are my five key thoughts from the event:
1. Everyone is taking SD-WAN much more seriously
One year ago, SD-WAN was just starting to get industry attention. The most adventurous enterprises were running pilots, but it remained largely unproven. At this year’s event, it was clear that the technology is becoming mainstream. It came up in most presentations, drew the largest crowds at breakout sessions, and the vendors in attendance saw a steady stream of visitors eager to learn more. Enterprises wanted to know how to get started with the technology. Do it yourself? Use a managed service provider? What are the telcos doing? Most people seemed to agree that there were potential benefits for almost all enterprises, regardless of size or vertical.
2. WAN requirements vary massively across industry verticals
The wide variance in approaches to building WANs across different verticals was very apparent. Large financial institutions still consider a multi-vendor private network essential for most locations, combined with dark fiber at their largest locations. When designing WANs, they build in protection against multiple critical failures on provider backbones. Other verticals are more dependent on a strong relationship with a managed service provider and private MPLS connectivity for most locations. High-volume verticals such as retail are increasingly looking at mobile and broadband to speed up provisioning and drive down costs. It’s interesting to see that most verticals can benefit from the innovative WAN technologies that are emerging, but for different reasons.
3. Cloud is changing the very definition of WAN
The portion of the network that used to represent the WAN – site to site connectivity for internal applications – is now often taken for granted. With so much traffic destined for the public Internet, most enterprises are now focusing on how to do this efficiently. Local breakouts to the Internet? Regional gateways with a comprehensive security stack? Cloud-based web proxy services? Direct connectivity to Microsoft or Amazon for critical infrastructure? The architecture is changing dramatically, and enterprises are also looking at better ways to monitor, manage and troubleshoot this new topology.
4. Lots of questions remain for global SD-WAN deployments
As SD-WAN moves from a theoretical technology to real-world deployments, many enterprises planning the next iteration of their global WAN are asking tough questions about deployment. Is MPLS still needed? If so, where? Is it better to work with a single ISP or use multiple ISPs for diversity and cost reasons? How do we deal with break-fix maintenance, field engineering and all the other complexities that were more straightforward in a traditional WAN? All of the major SD-WAN vendors (and the partner community) are making progress in these areas, and we are slowly starting to see what a real-world operating model can look like for SD-WAN. This is one of the top focus areas for Coevolve, as we help enterprises realize the benefits of this technology in an existing complex global environment.
5. Achieving huge WAN cost savings requires looking seriously at broadband
TeleGeography presented some great insights on market prices for bandwidth, with regional and technology breakdowns. Prices for MPLS and DIA connectivity continue to drop, but we are starting to see some convergence in this pricing and year-on-year reductions are smaller than they used to be. To achieve a step-change in bandwidth costs, enterprises need to seriously consider the use of business broadband connectivity. There is a 30-35x pricing gap between broadband and traditional connectivity in many markets, which presents an opportunity for enterprises to dramatically reduce costs, increase bandwidth, or both. Technologies like SD-WAN are making this a more viable proposition than before, as enterprises can avoid some of the complexity associated with bundling multiple connections of this type together. Vendor management becomes a top priority in this type of environment, as there are very few multi-geography ISPs that can deliver broadband cost effectively.
Overall, this was a great event. It’s interesting to see what the top priorities for enterprises are and how these are evolving over time. At Coevolve we are helping enterprises adopt these latest technologies in an agile way, and delivering real benefits to the business. We’ve deployed SD-WAN in over 20 countries already, with many more to come in the near future!
Coevolve delivers a suite of managed services for enterprises including next generation WAN design, optimization, and management.
Ciaran Roche
Ciaran Roche is the co-founder and CTO of Coevolve. Ciaran has worked in a range of technology strategy roles in Europe and the US, and has established Coevolve as a leader in driving enterprise adoption of next-generation technologies such as SD-WAN.