The State of the Global Enterprise WAN: Want to increase productivity? Lose the public Internet
Rarely will you come across a CIO, IT Director, Network Architect, or Network Manager who does not complain about network problems, and most of their complaints, whether they know it or now, are actually about the middle mile. Even though regional Internet quality and speeds have improved significantly in the past few years, over long distances, the public Internet is a breeding ground for congestion and packet loss, and network problems in the middle mile kill application performance.
While certain components of the enterprise WAN are improving, others are actually hindering the enterpriseās ability to conduct business over the Internet, especially as enterprises are more globally distributed than ever and as application traffic needs to travel across national borders and even oceans.
The state of #MyIndustry is mixed. (Download our State of the Enterprise WAN 2015 report to learn why.)
First- and last-mile broadband links are improving globally, especially as governments in regions such as APAC invest in telecom infrastructure.
Enterprises are continuing to migrate workloads to the cloud and shift away from on-premises applications in favor of cloud-based ones.
Businesses are moving beyond IP VPNs to an enterprise-grade private network with built-in optimization, so as to mitigate the effects of latency, congestion, packet loss, and jitter.
However, other trends are working against the enterprise:
The Internet middle mile is under siege. Demand for bandwidth is fast-rising but telecom giants tend to overlook investments in the middle mile, as they do not own it, and, therefore, cannot monopolize it.
Cloud-based video, VoIP, and other rich media gobble up an ever-increasing amount of bandwidth. People are clogging the Internet 24 x 7, since we can now stream movies, music, post live status updates, check e-mail, and even create graphics-rich content from smartphones and tablets.
Congestion on the Internet is at an all-time high.
As cloud adoption grows exponentially, more and more applications are moving outside the datacenter and in to the cloud.
With the above pros and cons, IT organizations are under tremendous pressure. Add in depleting CapEx budgets, globalization, shrinking IT workforces and the expectation that IT can handle anything from Big Data to data security to real-time network monitoring, all while ensuring a great end user experience, and the result is clear: CIOs and IT managers need an agile, easy-to-deploy, fully managed enterprise networking solution.
End users expect LAN-like speeds for all applications and when an organization fails to deliver, productivity drops. Even if the business has deep pockets, it canāt pay for point-to-point private lines to all the applications it uses in the cloud. Global bandwidth demands canāt be met with an increase in IT budgets, nor is the price of MPLS coming down fast enough. Enterprises want an agile and cost-effective WAN architecture that promises instant scalability and simplicity, and legacy solutions canāt provide it.
The global enterprise needs something new.
The State of the Global Enterprise WAN needs to be unmixed. Itās time to stop compromising with the public Internet and traditional network architectures alike...Check out my blog to find the way forward.
