Coevolve CTO Ciaran Roche is back on the pod. He's in the hot seat to discuss how middle-mile solutions are selected to solve real-world enterprise WAN issues.
When Ciaran joined us last year, we spent lots of time talking about cloud adoption and SD-WAN. You might remember that we discussed how freeing up the transport layer from single-source carrier WANs had created a new challenge: managing the middle mile.
Almost a year after that conversation, Greg and Ciaran delve into what we've seen from enterprises solving this middle-mile problem. The pair discusses the use cases for implementing a middle-mile solution, related products, and the adoption cycle for middle-mile services.
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The shift toward internet-based and hybrid WANs, combined with the adoption of multi-cloud environments, has created an increasing challenge known as the "middle mile" problem for enterprises.
This problem is particularly a cute for organizations with a global footprint dealing with long-distance traffic flows and can negatively impact the performance of latency-sensitive legacy applications> that may have been moved to cloud providers or on-premises data centers. Managing traffic between different cloud providers (intercloud connectivity) is also a growing challenge, particularly concerning egress costs and high-volume data transfers.
Middle mile solutions address these challenges by providing a layer that offers predictable performance for long-distance traffic, similar to traditional MPLS networks, but in a more modern, scalable environment.
These solutions can act as an abstraction layer to simplify connectivity to and between multiple cloud provider networks, streamlining routing and troubleshooting. They help enterprises manage the variability of usage-based billing in cloud environments by offering capabilities like bandwidth on demand. Utilizing a robust middle mile solution with internet at the edge allows enterprises to leverage the price performance benefits of internet transport while ensuring reliable backhauling of traffic to destinations.
The adoption of specific middle mile products is still in the early stages, influenced by various factors. Enterprises need to have already adopted foundational technologies like SD-WAN at the edge to fully leverage the benefits.
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) play a crucial role by acting as "the glue" to integrate and manage fragmented point solutions, including SD-WAN overlays, different middle mile providers, cloud connections, and remaining on-premises data centers. MSPs are responsible for managing complex routing and optimizing traffic paths across these different components.
Factors that may drive future adoption include increased awareness of the significant financial and performance benefits, greater vendor maturity and potential market consolidation through M&A activity, and enterprises becoming more comfortable moving away from traditional telco-centric network models.
The underlying economics of middle mile providers often rely on leveraging the excess capacity available in the wholesale network market (like submarine cables), which allows them to offer competitive rates for flexible bandwidth compared to static legacy connections.