Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 39 | Page 16

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). PRESENTED BY Download whitepaper here 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. 16 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 Outdated traditional WANs at remote sites are not designed to support the volume and velocity of traffic that is being pushed to branches and distributed offices.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 www.intelligentcio.com