Wan

Aug 11, 2020

The Dollars and Cents of SD-WAN

What's driving the shift to SD-WAN?

While there is no one single reason for SD-WAN's rise, cost savings is a major motivation cited by the WAN managers we've connected with at our WAN Summits and through our annual WAN Manager Survey.

Listen—the allure of dramatically reducing network spend is strong.

Jul 29, 2020

Sample Our Voice, Network, and WAN Research

We've made it to that slow and hazy last week of July. Seems like a good time  to shake things up and share some free research. 

Fact: you can sample the data that fuels blog posts like this and this and this. Keep scrolling to browse report content that's currently available to download at no cost. 

Jul 16, 2020

What to Know About Connecting to Your IaaS Provider

Around three in four enterprises that responded to our latest WAN Manager Survey reported having more than one infrastructure as a service (IaaS) partner. Azure and AWS were easily the most frequently cited by participants; 60% were using one or both of these providers.

With this in mind, how are enterprises connecting to their IaaS providers and why would you select one method over another? And what's the global geographic distribution of cloud providers looking like these days?

Jul 13, 2020

SD-WAN Through an Expense Management Lens

With the rising adoption of cloud services, IT leaders are evolving their networks to address new requirements and realize cost savings. 

This is what we'll be covering when we join the experts at Calero MDSL for a webinar on August 5. (And you know we'll be bringing our latest SD-WAN pricing data.)

Jul 6, 2020

The WAN and Working From Home

For several months now, much of the world has transitioned to remote work.

Where possible, knowledge workers have set up shop in home offices or kitchens or bedrooms, logging into virtual private networks and leaning on cloud services to keep business running uninterrupted.

Jun 29, 2020

A Changing WAN, Benchmarked

"In previous iterations of the WAN, you might have seen one large MPLS cloud, but with core sites having a larger MPLS port than edge sites. Now we're seeing a lot more technology differentiation between core versus middle tier versus edge sites." 

A self-proclaimed "data guy," TeleGeography Senior Analyst and Data Science Manager Mike Bisaha has spent years building tools to help IT managers better understand the performance, design, and cost of their networks.

And he's learned a lot about what the modern WAN looks like in the process. 

Jun 22, 2020

Everything You Wanted to Know About Sourcing Internet

The first challenge in sourcing internet is deciding what you need. It's finding a balance between cost and performance that's so important. Because in an internet world you're going to have a lot more choice than in an MPLS world.

This advice comes from Globalinternet Chief Portfolio Officer Mike Lloyd.

Jun 15, 2020

Now Streaming: The WAN Manager Podcast

Greg Bryan has a microphone, a seemingly endless supply of data, and the phone numbers of some prominent WAN experts. 

Sounds like the recipe for a podcast to me.

May 19, 2020

WAN Pricing Mythbusters: Do Tier 1 Carriers Charge More for DIA?

My colleague Elizabeth Thorne and I have been working on busting–or confirming–WAN pricing myths that we’ve heard in the wild. Last time I took on MPLS and DIA price convergence. 

I’m going to stick with DIA for this post, too.

Specifically, I want to know if Tier 1 IP providers charge more for DIA service than others. This is a myth I’ve actually argued in favor of in the past. It is certainly true that some carriers can provide a higher level of service, i.e. traffic that takes the fewest hops between destinations, and maybe even traffic that never touches another provider’s network. This might warrant higher prices.

May 14, 2020

WAN Pricing Mythbusters: Can SD-WAN Cut Your Network Spend in Half?

Welcome back to the third installment of our mythbusting series, where we break down legends in telecom pricing and see if they hold water. (Don’t miss our investigations on tall tales in local access budgeting and MPLS/DIA pricing lore.)