Is Your WAN Ready for the Cloud?

“Historically, and to this day, the Wide Area Network (WAN) has been all about physical locations. Branches, remote offices, retail stores, hospitals, and manufacturing sites all needed to be connected to a central location – the data-center.

The process of deploying connectivity to all locations and ensuring service levels and proper response times has not evolved much either. Customers have had to choose between 2 basic connectivity models: MPLS or VPN tunnels over the internet.

The cloud is challenging this assumption. When I refer to the ‘cloud’, I mean two distinct elements:

1. Public cloud infrastructure (also known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)). Platforms such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and IBM SoftLayer are all providing on-demand compute and storage services. These extend existing on-premise data-centers.
2. Public cloud application (Software as a Service (SaaS)). These are packaged applications, like Salesforce.com or Office 365, that require no direct management of the end customer”.