LATEST INTELLIGENCE
PRESENTED BY
Download whitepaper here
E
nterprises currently face challenges regarding
the price, performance, and flexibility of
traditional wide area networks (WANs).
Aggressive growth in the adoption of public cloud
services (28.6% year-over-year growth in 2017) is
forcing organizations to look elsewhere for a more
effective network solution to address distributed
traffic across remote sites and branch offices. Some
of the specific issues organizations face with their
traditional WANs include:
• High total cost of ownership (TCO)
• Lengthy provisioning cycles
• Performance degradation with the growth of
cloud traffic
• Inadequate redundancy and resiliency
• Lack of application-aware connectivity
• To better manage WAN investments, enterprises
are adopting a new approach for their distributed
branch office networks. Software-defined WAN (SD-
18
INTELLIGENTCIO
WAN) offers improved performance, agility, and
operational flexibility plus significant cost savings.
But not all SDWAN solutions are created equal.
Traditional WAN performance comes at a
premium because it is almost entirely limited to
expensive circuits like multiprotocol label switching
(MPLS). At the same time, the rapid increase of
cloud applications being used across distributed
organizations has caused a sharp uptick in network
bandwidth demands.
As these performance needs increase, traditional
WAN infrastructures become dramatically more
expensive, complex to deploy, and difficult to
manage. As evidence of this problem, according
to a poll conducted at Gartner’s 2016 data center
conference, “a 6:1 ratio of respondents described
their WAN as either ‘brittle and slow, prone to outage,
or too expensive,’ versus ‘cost-effective and agile’.” n
www.intelligentcio.com