Bandwidth prices remain on the descent, driven downward by increasing competition and new transmission technologies and network topologies that lower unit costs.
IP transit providers face a formidable mix of unrelenting price erosion, peering alternatives, and brisk volume growth with evolving traffic patterns.
This has shaken all but the most committed operators out of the market, beyond a few opportunities that present a clear competitive advantage or complement other lines of business.
The result? A core group of specialists are serving most of the market.
As enterprises migrate to hybrid WANs, they also need to rethink security and monitoring.
A panel of experts offered their advice on these issues at April’s WAN Summit New York in a session titled WAN Monitoring and Security: Utilizing WAN Acceleration/Optimization, Cloud Security and Performance Data in the New Hybrid WAN.
Software defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) can be a game changer for global enterprises that have increasing bandwidth requirements with limited budgets. Or for those that frequently open new locations and need a scaleable solution that applies consistent policies across their ever-expanding network.
Hybrid WANs that employ a combination of technologies - such as MPLS and Internet connectivity - have become increasingly popular as enterprise customers and service providers embrace the software-defined WAN.
What is really driving the move to the hybrid WAN?
And what advice do those who have adopted the technology have for those planning a similar transition?
Network specialists herald the software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) as the most significant advancement in corporate networks in years.
Here’s why: SD-WAN dynamically routes traffic among multiple connections based on the performance of each link and the priority of applications using the network.
Connections may include relatively expensive, high-performance MPLS VPN links, lower-cost dedicated internet access, or cheaper, “best efforts” business broadband service. Accordingly, SD-WAN dynamically optimizes connectivity cost and application performance. (More on that here.)