When I reached out to today's podcast guest—Jim Poole, Vice President of Business Development at Equinix—about being on the show, I asked if he'd be willing to dig into NaaS or edge data centers.
If you’re an enterprise network manager in need of a dedicated cloud connection service, you’re in luck; you’ve got a wide array of service providers and locations to choose from.
You could set up a link directly with the cloud provider, but why not use a third-party—such as a carrier, colocation provider, or connectivity specialist?
The question then changes. Who are you going to choose? And where will you set up your connections? This often depends on the location of your enterprise WAN in relation to the cloud providers’ regions or data centers.
In this analysis, we’ll explore options available to network managers.
In a recent analysis, we highlighted how DIA has gained ground as an integral part of the global enterprise WAN and how it compares in price directly to MPLS.
However, it is not just a matter of switching underlay products, but also understanding the global pricing dynamics of those alternatives.
Many of us are still trying to decide whether 2021 felt like ten years or six months, but there is no doubt that aspects of it were extensions of 2020.
This was no exception in the WAN world, where we saw many trends continue, such as SD-WAN rollouts, expansion of local internet breakouts, and most enterprises continuing to have a large portion of workers staying home and connecting remotely.
My colleague Elizabeth Thorne and I had a great conversation about key corporate network trends at the end of the year—now it's time to dive into the hard data.
As global enterprises become more reliant on cloud—and start to break away or reduce their traditional MPLS circuits—the “middle mile” of the internet is coming into focus.
Today, I want to examine the use cases that vendors hope to address through middle mile network services. (And their basic value proposition.)
“Middle mile” loosely refers to the network segment between local access and destination network.
From the perspective of a potential customer, it might refer to whatever happens between its connection with the service provider and its application in the cloud.
SD-WAN's core promise of optimizing network performance through load balancing—and cutting costs by integrating internet into the WAN—has proven attractive. And it's helped the service take root among many large enterprise network teams.
We've written before about how prices vary by geography.
Well, it almost goes without saying that they also change over time.
In the past few decades, the corporate WAN has undergone a few massive reformations.
Technology such as SD-WAN, migration to the cloud, and the sudden surge of remote and distributed work have upended the modern WAN.
The composition of the underlay, flow of traffic, end points of workers, and security postures are all undergoing a massive shift. Like the protagonist in Canadian power trio Rush’s hit “Tom Sawyer,” WAN managers are realizing that “changes aren’t permanent, but change is.”
