Author: Binat

SD-WANs are reinvigorating the WAN landscape.  The focus is shifting away from businesses layering additional services, like WAN Optimization, on top of their older, high-cost MPLS to adding multiple and disparate types of WAN links that are more robust at a lower cost.

Enterprises are adopting this new Hybrid WAN strategy in order to keep up with trends like globalization, cloud computing, and mobility. And SD-WAN is a major component that is helping to further the adoption of this rapidly-evolving infrastructure.

WHY GLOBALIZATION AND THE CLOUD MATTER

The WAN has become key for multinational businesses to connect overseas workers with centralized applications. Traditionally, an enterprise utilized MPLS to connect remote offices, and then added WAN Optimization appliances to make the most of those expensive private connections.

However, applications and network infrastructure no longer reside at a company headquarters or data center; they are increasingly being provided to businesses in the form of a cloud platform or infrastructure-as-a-service. And, these days, enterprises must do more than provide connectivity between distant global offices. They must also deliver reliable application performance from newer cloud or outsourced data center offerings to remote and mobile workers, contractors, and even global business partners.

Moving resources to the cloud complicates application delivery, since it’s just not feasible to run MPLS connections to each and every cloud data center you rely on. Even if the costs were not prohibitive (which they are), the lack of flexibility in this approach flies in the face of today’s agile business movement. MPLS contracts tend to extend for years. Plus, it can take months to deploy to a new location, even for something simple as relocating an office to a building across the street.

That is why most organizations today are relying more on the public Internet to access their cloud applications. The obvious concern for a business with this approach is that the public Internet is plagued by instability and congestion. Dropped packets, latency, and jitter all undermine application performance. When knowledge workers, who have become accustomed to using their applications at LAN speeds, experience delays from poor long-haul WAN connections, business productivity takes a major hit, and I.T. managers get complaints.

This is why many organizations are beginning to focus strategically on developing a “Hybrid WAN” approach – some combination of MPLS and the Internet.

WHERE DOES SD-WAN FIT IN

Generally, SD-WAN technology provides the enterprise WAN with better path selection and control. But another aspect of a few SD-WAN technologies today is WAN Optimization. Because WAN Optimization helps enterprises save bandwidth and improve application performance over a single WAN link, it is often used with MPLS to reduce bandwidth requirements. If you are going to pay a premium for MPLS, you’d better get the most of it.

However, the feature sets of today’s SD-WAN products vary greatly from vendor to vendor. Most promise to utilize and manage multiple WAN links that include MPLS and the public Internet, allowing enterprises to load balance over those links, while also creating policies to prioritize certain types of traffic. Management is a key component, but application optimization may not be included, and large deployments can still be architecturally challenging.

A basic SD-WAN “hybrid” deployment might use multiple types of links, reserving the more expensive MPLS for something like video conferencing, which requires a higher quality stable connection, and then saving Internet links for lower priority or non-real time traffic.

But SD-WAN technology alone can’t provide the guaranteed service most enterprises require. While the Holy Grail of SD-WAN might be to allow businesses to reduce overall WAN operating costs by using cheaper underlying links for all of their WAN connectivity, the risk is currently too great for most businesses to go “all in.”  Pulling in the public Internet as a part of a hybrid WAN strategy makes sense, but relying only on the public Internet to provide reliable and stable long-haul WAN access to business-critical applications is potentially disastrous.

BEYOND HYBRID WAN: LOOK TO THE MIDDLE MILE

The Internet, by and large, is comprised of many competing companies, and the priority for each company is to protect their own traffic and their customers’ traffic. When traffic stays within a single provider’s network, it generally works pretty well. But if traffic crosses oceans and national borders, it will be handed off from one provider to another, each one seeking to dump traffic off at peering points in the middle as quickly as possible. This long-haul data relay race, with your traffic as the baton, is what we call the dreaded “middle mile”.

Now, it’s probably just not conceivable that one of these other large network companies might route their traffic at the expense of yours during a period of congestion…(Nawww, of course not!)  But this actually DOES happen, and is the reason many larger enterprises go the route of paying top dollar for MPLS in the first place.

For enterprises trying to connect their distributed global locations and business processes together across a WAN, this middle mile is emerging as a major enterprise bottleneck. And for enterprises attempting to incorporate a Voice (VoIP) or Video WAN strategy, a quality middle mile is an absolute requirement. Poor network conditions like packet loss, congestion, or jitter can reduce voice or video quality to the point of being unusable, and SD-WAN or WANOp technologies don’t have the ability to solve these issues.

THE SOLUTION TO THE MIDDLE MILE DOESN’T START WITH HYBRID WAN

With a hybrid WAN approach enabled by SD-WAN services, businesses no longer have to exclusively deploy expensive, higher bandwidth private WAN links to handle increasing traffic loads.

However, expensive, higher bandwidth private WAN links will still be a necessary part of a hybrid solution – and any hybrid WAN that re-routes traffic over the public Internet will still be subject to the problems discussed above. Not to mention that a hybrid approach will necessarily be complex and costly, requiring that IT construct this heterogenous WAN from various different vendors.

Instead of a hybrid WAN, what enterprises need is a homogenous WAN.

Aryaka’s global SD-WAN is designed to deliver any application, anywhere in the world up to 40x.

For example, Aryaka’s global SD-WAN solves the middle mile problems while reducing complexity and cost, because it is the middle mile. It provides an enterprise-grade global private network that has been purpose-built to accelerate applications over long distances, meaning it provides the stability and reliablilty of MPLS, but with the flexibility the public Internet. Since it has already been pre-built for the enterprise, it can be deployed in a matter of hours or days and consumed as a NaaS. Therefore, businesses no longer have to wait months for a stable connection like they used to for MPLS, nor do they have to cobble together a hybrid WAN from multiple vendors and manage all of the disparate pieces.

Aryaka’s services also include built-in network and application monitoring, so network managers can easily gain insight into traffic and reroute around problems quickly and easily.

With trends like virtualization and cloud already in the mainstream, applications and IT infrastructure have evolved dramatically over the past several years. Now, it’s time for the enterprise WAN to catch up. Hybrid WANs may look like a step in the right direction, but IT must consider the costs of implementing a “good enough” approach using yesterday’s technology over investing in a unified solution that can future-proof the WAN.

MPLS is entering its sunset, and yet telcos aren’t ready to let you go. Rather than see you invest a few more years in a legacy technology that needs to be retrofitted with WAN Optimization, SD-WAN, and more, we held a webinar to discuss your alternatives.

We were joined by Jim Metzler, Founder and Vice President of Ashton, Metzler, and Associates, along with Yohan Beghein, System Integration Manager at Skullcandy, to discuss how network admins like you can optimize the enterprise WAN without turning back to MPLS.

Here are the key takeaways from the webinar. You can access the complete webinar here.

THE REALITY OF MODERN NETWORKING

One of the biggest concerns for any IT team can be summed up in one single image, as shown in the diagram above. The happy days of a simplified, traditional “hub and spoke” model of branch office connectivity (shown on the left) are, unfortunately, over. The current IT landscape is more complex than ever, and IT teams find themselves responsible for not just the users at branch offices, but also an influx of remote users, an eclectic mix of applications and delivery models (both on-premise and Cloud/SaaS applications), and myriad devices.

Metzler described how most of his clients are facing intensified global pressure from organizations whose business models now completely rely on IT to gain a competitive edge, capture new markets quickly, and provide customers with fast and reliable service. The CIOs are expected to deliver these results while dealing with a lack of IT resources and keeping costs low.

As the IT landscape becomes more complex and the cost and time taken to run and maintain the systems skyrockets, this snowballs into a mammoth task for the IT leaders and their teams.

It is then of little surprise that when Metzler polled the webinar attendees about the top factors that will drive changes in the enterprise WAN, a staggering 47% chose the “need to reduce cost” as a primary driver. An additional 29% chose “increasing security and improving performance for real time applications,” and 26% and 24% chose “better access to cloud” and “increasing availability” respectively.

MPLS: THE DEATH OF A GIANT

One of the fundamental problems in the enterprise WAN space today is that, while IT and business have undergone a 180-degree change in the last two decades, there has been negligible innovation in the networking fundamentals. As a result, 66% of IT executives today are not/or only moderately happy with their WAN architecture, as Metzler explained.

MPLS made a massive commercial debut in the early 2000s and became the gold standard for connectivity. The problem is that MPLS was not built to handle the cloud intensive, demanding workloads of today.

While MPLS did its fair bit in providing a reliable connectivity to global enterprises, it is clear now that it can hardly match up to the current connectivity demands.

For example, MPLS is slow to deploy, as it can take months or even years to set up a new link. The results of another poll during the webinar confirmed that this is a top concern for IT executives.

The poll also revealed that complexity and accessing cloud and SaaS applications were the second and third concerns on IT executives’ minds regarding MPLS. All of these concerns can be addressed by bypassing MPLS and using the public Internet, but the Internet cannot be trusted for critical enterprise traffic due to high latency, congestion, and security concerns.

In a world where most global organizations are adopting a cloud-first approach, MPLS is poised to become irrelevant soon. The reasons are manifold: few cloud/SaaS vendors have MPLS connectivity options and most MPLS vendors do not own cloud/SaaS vendor infrastructure or provide support for applications hosted in the cloud.

Most global companies today are feeling the pressure to find a suitable alternative to MPLS and the Internet. What they need is an enterprise-grade connectivity solution that is intelligent, secure, quick to deploy, cloud-ready, and cost effective.

SKULLCANDY: A CASE STUDY IN WAN TRANSFORMATION

To emphasize the importance of rethinking the WAN strategy and the benefits it can bring to the enterprise, Metzler then invited Yohan Beghein, System Integration Manager at Skullcandy to share a case study. Beghein discussed how Skullcandy, one of the global brand names for high-quality headphones, earphones, Bluetooth speakers, and related accessories, replaced their MPLS circuits with Aryaka’s global SD-WAN to connect offices in the United States, Canada, Germany, China, and Japan.

Beghien explained how Skullcandy was facing a challenge that many organizations across the world deal with: a spike in enterprise bandwidth requirements during the winter holiday season. The company was facing latency and application performance issues over MPLS in Germany, China, and Japan. Executive teams across different regions around the world could not collaborate effectively, as their telepresence solution was unable to keep up with the high latencies. Moreover, MPLS bandwidth was prohibitively expensive, and it took “forever” to scale up or down.

Skullcandy realized that they needed to move beyond the conventional solutions to a more flexible and reliable connectivity solution. By choosing a cloud-ready SD-WAN solution, Skullcandy could achieve up to 10x better application performance improvement, 93% data reduction across all applications, and about 40 Mbps peak bandwidth savings. Read the full Skullcandy case study to learn more.

GLOBAL SD-WAN GAINS TRACTION AS THE MPLS ALTERNATIVE

In recent years, SD-WAN emerged as the saving grace for most enterprises grappling with connectivity issues. However, not all SD-WANs can provide a complete replacement for MPLS.

When evaluating SD-WANs, you should look for a holistic solution that provides:

Short deployment intervals

Alternatives to MPLS pricing without sacrificing QoS or security

End-to-end multi-layered security functionality

Built-in WAN Optimization

Secure, high-performance access to cloud applications and services

End-to-end visibility and holistic control of the entire network

Reduced complexity

Managed service option

Metzler ended the webinar with a call to action for global enterprises struggling with connectivity issues: He suggested that companies need to start evaluating and write down the key challenges that might mean it’s time to re-evaluate the enterprise WAN. CIOs and IT leaders need to start weighing out alternative WAN solutions with a focus on whether their solution can truly respond to those key challenges and support their global operations. Most IT teams need a solution that can help them reduce or avoid complexity and relieve the team by providing support in the form of managed services.

If the enterprise WAN is like a fabric, stitched together with hardware, software, and the human resources who maintain it, it’s possible that the advent of the cloud has created a large hole. Is there a tear in your network fabric?

MISSING THREADS

For years, the enterprise WAN was composed of interconnecting links and pipes, most usually through MPLS.

With MPLS, an application or data housed in the company’s headquarters or data center could travel to a branch office with little to no problem, barring long delays for deployment and scaling and potential latency over long distances.

Though creating a global network quilt was a little DIY, requiring IT to stitch together contracts from multiple vendors around the world, the coverage worked for enterprises’ needs at the time.

But in today’s cloud-first business environment, where work is increasingly mobile and globalized, an MPLS-based WAN is missing major threads.

MPLS is point-to-point, which means that it cannot reach the cloud without workarounds and extra hardware and/or software. And connecting to the cloud via the public Internet introduces latency, packet loss, and jitter, as well as security issues – all situations that MPLS was supposed to correct for. That means the performance of mission- and business-critical applications suffer on an MPLS-based enterprise WAN.

For the same reasons, MPLS is not optimized for the remote and mobile workforce. When workers leave branch offices to complete tasks – such as salespeople working on the go or developers working from home – MPLS networks can’t reach them. That means IT must make an investment in VPN or other secure mobile networks. In addition, branch offices in developing or remote areas may not even be accessible by MPLS, requiring similar add-ons.

FRAYED EDGES

For many network providers today, the solution to the “missing threads” is to pile on hardware and software at the edge. Unfortunately, this creates frayed edges in the network fabric. SD-WAN is useful for connecting to the cloud; however, when placed at the edge, it only solves for problems at the edge.

And if the entire fabric is missing a thread, adding a small bit at the edge doesn’t make up for the instability throughout the rest of the network.

SD-WAN that relies on the public Internet to connect users to mission- and business-critical applications is SD-WAN without an optimized middle mile. The public Internet is subject to disruption, and because it’s a public WAN, it is unpredictable in its disruptions. In addition, for global businesses, latency gets worse as distances between users and data increase. So even if SD-WAN improves connectivity at the edge, business users are still subject to slow connections and poor application performance.

What enterprises need to make sure you have in the right application delivery is a fabric that comes with it’s own thread.

BLANKETING THE GLOBE WITH BETTER APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Aryaka’s global SD-WAN is just such a thread. Rather than optimizing an old technology that can’t keep up with changing business needs or relying on the public Internet for connectivity, Aryaka’s SmartCONNECT is the network fabric.

Using a purpose-built, enterprise-grade global private network, Aryaka has abstracted connectivity to 28 POPs around the world, all within 30 ms of 95% of the world’s business users. Those POPs connect to Aryaka’s network access points, giving your enterprise users an easy way to hop onto the network from anywhere they do business.

It also contains built-in SD-WAN to reduce complexity and cost, along with WAN Optimization layered on top of the network to increase application performance for end users around the globe.

This secure network is therefore not subject to disruption like the public Internet, nor is it expensive, difficult, and time-consuming to deploy. Instead, it provides accelerated access to every SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS platform with the privacy and stability you would expect from an enterprise network. Aryaka provides simple and quick deployment with on-demand scalability for faster project implementation – all you need is a few days (or even hours), and the network can be set up or scaled anywhere in the world.