If you want to do a proper review of the state of the corporate WAN—in light of digital transformation, cloud, SD-WAN adoption, and MPLS utilization—there's no one better to talk to than Phil Gervasi, Director of Technical Evangelism at Kentik.
Lucky for me, he was this week's guest on TeleGeography Explains the Internet.
I was so glad to have Phil on the pod. Our conversation took more than a few twists and turns. We covered the state of lift-and-shift into the cloud, the perseverance of MPLS, real use cases of SD-WAN, and, of course, lots on how network changes have impacted the visualization of network performance and security. (And how that needs to evolve.)
There's a lot in this episode. Dive in below.
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Key Takeaways
The relationship between SD-WAN and MPLS has evolved
While initial narratives suggested SD-WAN would lead to ditching MPLS to save money, the reality is that MPLS utilization is stabilizing.
Many large enterprises found it financially or technically advantageous to keep MPLS circuits due to long-term contracts, negotiated low prices, or the need for guaranteed low latency for critical applications. SD-WAN is now primarily seen as a way to augment network operations, simplifying management across hundreds of sites, templatizing security policies, and facilitating cloud connectivity. It is a manifestation of software-defined networking principles, offering centralized control and programmatic interfaces.
Enterprises are adopting a more deliberate and strategic approach to cloud migration
The early idea was to move all servers and workloads to the cloud to eliminate data centers. However, implementing this revealed that some applications don't perform well in the cloud, and data transfer costs can be unexpectedly high.
Companies are now being smarter and more deliberate about what applications and workloads they move to the cloud, considering performance metrics, latency sensitivity, and cost implications.
Network visibility has become significantly more challenging due to the modern, distributed nature of networks
With networks often comprising disparate resources, including local networks, private data centers, and various public cloud regions, visibility can exist in "islands" or "pockets."
Gathering a complete picture requires collecting telemetry from many different sources. This data is often very diverse in format and scale. Mature visibility platforms aim to collect as much high-quality data as possible to enable correlation and provide actionable insights for network engineers, security professionals, and application teams, moving toward a "single pane of glass" view.
Leveraging techniques from data science and AI is becoming crucial to analyze this volume and diversity of data and identify relevant issues without causing alert fatigue.
Greg Bryan
Greg is Senior Manager, Enterprise Research at TeleGeography. He's spent the last decade and a half at TeleGeography developing many of our pricing products and reports about enterprise networks. He is a frequent speaker at conferences about corporate wide area networks and enterprise telecom services. He also hosts our podcast, TeleGeography Explains the Internet.
