LATEST INTELLIGENCE
INTELLIGENCE
UNDERSTANDING THE
OBSTACLES TO WAN
TRANSFORMATION
SECURITY, PERFORMANCE, AND TCO
E
Executive Summary
PRESENTED BY
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Network engineering and operations leaders are
looking to replace their traditional wide-area network
(WAN) architectures with software-defined wide-
area networks (SD-WAN) in order to support the
ever-increasing traffic demands (and associated
connectivity costs) that come with digital innovation
(DI). These DI-driven initiatives improve staff
productivity and create new business opportunities.
Yet, they also impact networking performance and
ratchet up security concerns. SD-WAN adoption
is accelerating and many organizations have
embarked on SD-WAN implementations. But many
SD-WAN solutions present serious challenges – from
inadequate security to high total cost of ownership
(TCO). Understanding these issues is key to
navigating the increasingly complex market for WAN
edge technologies.
How DI Is Impacting Corporate Networks Distributed
organizations are embracing a wide range of DI
technologies. This includes adoption of Software-
as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, cloud on-ramping
connectivity, Voice over IP (VoIP) and video
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INTELLIGENTCIO
communications tools, use of DevOps to speed time
deployment for new web applications, and Internet-of-
Things (IoT) devices for data collection and telemetry.
However, these DI initiatives present new challenges
for network engineering and operations leaders who
must sustain both performance and security from the
data-center campus to branch offices on the network
edge. Outdated traditional WANs at remote sites
are not designed to support the volume and velocity
of traffic that is being pushed to branches and
distributed offices. Specifically, these WAN solutions
employ a multiprotocol label switching (MPLS)-
based network that backhauls all traffic through
the corporate data center for filtering and security
checks. This hub-and-spoke architecture can lead
to bottlenecks at the network edge, which results in
sluggish performance for end-users – especially under
the ever-increasing bandwidth demands that come
with DI adoption.
But that is not the only problem with the traditional
WAN solutions. MPLS connections are also expensive,
and the costs can quickly compile as branch traffic
volumes continue to climb with no end in sight. n
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