This from our friends at CenturyLink via their ThinkGig blog. If you are considering SD-WAN, make sure you have a look at hybrid SD-WAN as a service.
Is your WAN an aging network that’s slipping out of your control and slowing down your business? It’s a serious question. It’s time for the network to keep up with the rest of IT.
Wide area networks are aging, and network pros are tasked with upgrading them to meet business performance standards and new, critical digital business initiatives. When all your key applications were in your data center, your age-old WAN strategy was fine.
But, all your key applications are not in your data center anymore. Many of them are accessed over the Internet via SaaS delivery models and broadband connections from all your branch locations. And, the transition to SaaS is only going to increase as time goes on.
Some IT shops have been doing network gymnastics to accommodate the rise of SaaS for their branches and remote locations, routing (a.k.a., “hairpinning”) traffic through a central data center in order to enforce security policies. That adds complexity and latency issues in application performance. But, it offered some semblance of control even if it frustrated the users waiting for their data.
Local broadband connections at branch locations circumvented this problem but grew on an ad hoc basis. Of course, incorporating all those local broadband connections into the WAN is possible but not easy. Doing so adds complexity. You have to accept that you have a hybrid WAN with lots of individual connections of varying speeds and security capabilities, and with no central management capability.
This is the type of integration problem SD-WAN addresses. It gives you one policy setting mechanism for all connections via a flexible overlay network.
Many DIY approaches exist for SD-WAN as a hybrid solution. But, you still have to procure it, build it, configure it, provision connections and manage it all – from the software to the disparate transports.
Contact ATC for a free consultation on how you can modernize your WAN and the various options that exist, including hybrid SD-WAN as a managed service. Read the full “Aging Network” article from ThinkGig here. Learn about CenturyLink managed SD-WAN service here.
CenturyLink and Level 3 Network Map
