Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 16 | Page 18

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