Those who joined us for our recent Deep Dive into cloud and WAN geography know that we covered a lot of ground in just 90 minutes. And Principal Analyst Patrick Christian wasted no time giving our audience a crash course in vendor geography.
It's another case study episode of the WAN Manager Podcast. Today we welcome Ian Calderbank, Enterprise Network Architect at PageGroup, to the hot seat.
Our quest to bring middle mile understanding to the masses continues.
This time we've prepared something for our visual learners.
In our latest episode of the WAN Manager Podcast, we dig into sourcing. Our listeners know that we often discuss the migration of large enterprises away from one or two global suppliers for a mostly MPLS network to a novel mix of transport types and suppliers. This is especially true due to changing trends in cloud migration, SD-WAN, and security.
Our data shows that a majority of enterprises have more than one IaaS provider. For SaaS, that number can be dozens, hundreds, even more. And most have moved the majority of their data centers off corporate premises to some kind of shared facility.
This means most companies are dealing with multi-cloud connectivity in some shape or form; WAN managers of course have to handle that from a performance and cost perspective.
The enterprise WAN is increasingly built on an underlay, using various transport services from a variety of providers. So it's more crucial than ever to understand the footprint geography of your carriers, ISPs, NaaS providers, and cloud service providers.
We've got you covered. On Thursday, June 17 we're assembling a team of experts for a morning roundup of all things cloud and WAN geography.
We often say that we'll be taking a "deep dive" into an issue at the beginning of our WAN Manager Podcasts. Today we almost mean that literally, as Greg welcomes TeleGeography Research Director Alan Mauldin to talk about submarine cables.
We're going back to the middle. The middle mile, that is.
Like many telecom terms, this is one that you might have to follow up with “what exactly do you mean by that?”
The average enterprise network had MPLS running at 82% of sites in 2018. That fell to just 58% in 2020. About one-third of those networks have active backups for their MPLS service—a quarter of them have passive backups.
Looking at these numbers, we have to ask: what role will MPLS play in the WAN moving forward?
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