LATEST INTELLIGENCE
INTELLIGENCE
UNDERSTANDING THE
OBSTACLES TO WAN
TRANSFORMATION
SECURITY, PERFORMANCE, AND TCO
E
Executive Summary
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).
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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.
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INTELLIGENTCIO
This includes adoption of Software-as-a-Service
(SaaS) applications, cloud on-ramping connectivity,
Voice over IP (VoIP) and video 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 Outdated traditional WANs at remote sites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. n
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