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.)
David Ferguson, VP of Infrastructure Strategy at Pearson, shared his experiences making changes to the FTSE 100 Education Company’s global network infrastructure. David's strategy was to adopt an "Internet First" approach which prioritized choosing the Internet to deliver traffic over MPLS whenever possible.
