It’s no secret that the legacy WAN faces many challenges adapting to today’s business, the big question is: What’s going to replace MPLS? SD-WAN appliances are the obvious answer, but not necessarily the best one.
Legacy WAN architectures based on MPLS services provide predictable performance between offices, but they’re not implemented in a way that easily accommodates the new realities facing IT. Users continue to require ever increasing amounts of bandwidth, an expensive resource for MPLS networks. Connecting to cloud datacenters and cloud applications either often becomes costly and difficult, or painfully slow with MPLS. Mobile users are still ignored by MPLS infrastructure.
Many CIOs have embraced software-defined WANs (SD-WAN) appliances to solve their WAN problems. And while SD-WAN appliances move the WAN in the right direction, they focus more on fixing yesterday’s problems addressed by MPLS services, and not on meeting today’s IT challenges faced confronting businesses.
Mobile users are still ignored. And companies continue to have to figure out how to secure the many Internet access points created by SD-WAN. They also need to find a way to deliver voice and other critical, real-time applications across the unpredictable Internet.
A new approach fixes the problems of SD-WAN appliances without introducing the problems of MPLS or other carrier-managed services. To help, we put together a thorough analysis of MPLS and SD-WAN alternatives, identifying their strengths and weaknesses, and suggesting a way forward.
You can download the complete eBook here.