It was another year of top-rate discussions about enterprise networks, hybrid WANs, the future of MPLS, SD-WAN in the workplace, and more.
In 2017 the WAN Summit ventured to New York, Singapore, and London (and we added a bonus round in San Jose) to share ideas, gain new perspectives, and talk with suppliers, customers, and peers about all things WAN.
We decided to take a walk down memory lane to collect some of our favorite moments. Below are 10 interesting and informative stories that merit another read before we're back with more summits in 2018. On that note: we hope you have Dubai and New York 2018 on your calendar already!
How SD-WAN Helped Autodesk Hit Cloud Security, Efficiency, and Cost Goals
What's The Story? Autodesk, a 130-location multi-national software company, relies on the cloud to support many applications. This requires connectivity to the Azure, Office 365, and Amazon web services.
Until recently, all Autodesk locations relied on MPLS connectivity to a company data center. However, they've been shifting to a software defined WAN. This case study highlights what they've learned along the way.
The Future of the WAN: Fewer Tradeoffs?
What's The Story? More bandwidth. Better performance. More flexibility. We’ve been accustomed to thinking of these as trade-offs when it comes to wide area networking. However, enterprises are increasingly maximizing all three factors.
This WAN Summit panel brought together service and technology providers focused on enterprise WAN connectivity to discuss technology’s role in supporting an increased demand for a dynamic, flexible WAN environment—with fewer compromises.
Benchmarking Enterprise Networks: Modeling Hybrid Network Costs
What's The Story? The budget-conscious WAN managers of the world know that connectivity costs change all the time.
This story is all about the dollars and cents of implementing a network. How do you benchmark? What trends in network pricing should you know? What cost optimization strategies should be on your radar?
From Farm to Fork Via Carrier Neutral Facilities
What's The Story? Cargill specializes in food, agriculture, trading, and distributing palm oil and other agricultural commodities.
In 2015 it had a legacy network with a global WAN provided by two global MPLS providers with pockets of smaller local providers. There were 1,500 sites globally—many in remote and challenging locations—and 12 data centers across Latin America, Europe/Middle East/Africa, Asia-Pacific, and North America.
This post shares three big lessons learned from their most recent network transformation.
From MPLS to SDWAN: The Right Choice for Fast-Growing VWR
What's The Story? Sen Chokkan, senior manager of network engineering for VWR, brought his SD-WAN story to New York in 2017. With SD-WAN, new sites can be added to the network in a fraction of the time required by MPLS connectivity. It can also help growing companies meet escalating bandwidth demands without increasing the WAN budget.
With SD-WAN, new sites can be added to the network in a fraction of the time required by MPLS connectivity.
VWR has nearly 180 locations worldwide and acquires 10 to 15 companies per year, giving Chokkan substantial insight into the challenges of migrating from MPLS to SD-WAN across a growing network footprint. Here's what he's learned.
Growing Your WAN to Meet the Demands of the Modern Workplace
What's The Story? As a WAN manager, how do you ensure your business has an available, reliable, and secure network when the nature of the workplace is always changing?
A panel of telecom veterans discussed this delicate balance, covering the evolving nature of monitoring, SD-WAN, cloud and software-based services, security, emerging managed services, and much more. See what they had to say above.
Keeping it Simple: How Trinity Industries Made Their Move to SD-WAN
What's The Story? Seven years ago Trinity Industries started the first phase of adopting an SD-WAN enabled network by looking for additional network reliability. It ran a WAN of mostly MPLS circuits with some static IP Sec VPN tunnels, but found that this set-up wasn’t always cost effective. Further, it didn’t provide enough bandwidth.
How'd they structure their search? Click on the story above to find out.
WAN Monitoring and Security: WAN Optimization, Cloud Security, and Performance Data
What's The Story? As enterprises migrate to hybrid WANs, they also need to rethink security and monitoring.
Traditionally, WAN security issues were addressed by backhauling traffic eventually destined for the internet to headquarters, where powerful firewall and intrusion detection and information protection traffic screening could be applied. That approach, however, wasted bandwidth and added latency.
A panel of experts offered their advice on these issues in New York.
What's The Story? DHL has more than 10,000 sites spread across more than 200 countries.
MPLS connectivity is provided by a mixture of service providers, including the likes of AT&T, British Telecom, and Orange. The company relies, to a large extent, on managed services for voice, data, and mobile connectivity.
While different companies have different reasons for shifting to hybrid WAN, the key motivator for DHL was a simple one. “We’re looking to save costs."
While different companies have different reasons for shifting to hybrid WAN, the key motivator for DHL was a simple one. “We’re looking to save costs," Head of Network Architecture Michael Becerra said. Read his full story above.
How Do You Benchmark Your WAN? Here's What Our WAN Summit New York Attendees Said.
What's The Story? At the 2017 WAN Summit New York, we polled our largest audience to date about their WAN design, how they use SD-WAN and MPLS, and how they benchmark WAN costs.
Needless to say, their responses tell a story of their own. Peruse the poll results in this post.
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.
Brianna Boudreau
Senior Research Manager Brianna Boudreau joined TeleGeography in 2008. She specializes in pricing and market analysis for wholesale and enterprise network services with a regional focus on Asia and Oceania. While at TeleGeography, Brianna has helped develop and launch several new lines of research, including our Cloud and WAN Research Service.
Mike Bisaha
Michael Bisaha is a Senior Analyst and Director of Data Science at TeleGeography. In addition to his work covering competitive market and pricing trends in the wholesale and enterprise telecom space, he heads the Data Science group responsible for data management, product development, design, forecast modeling, and custom analytics initiatives.
Erik Kreifeldt
Principal Analyst Erik Kreifeldt tracks the international network services industry, advising global operators on market trends. With more than 20 years of industry experience—including over a decade of research with TeleGeography—he specializes in strategic decisions that require genuine data, analysis, and insight. Before joining TeleGeography, Erik was an optical networking industry analyst, trade reporter, and optical physics science writer. He continues to draw inspiration from the profound-yet-underappreciated work of maintaining infrastructure essential for global commerce—and awe at how it all gets done.