MPLS: Massive, Painful Layoffs (in) Store?

What do the numbers 4000 and 1100 have to do with your enterprise WAN?

Those are the number of layoffs taking place at British Telecom and Cisco. Along with a big layoff at Riverbed (a WAN Optimization company) just a few years ago, these layoffs are a sign of the turning tide against MPLS, which may still be the foundation of your enterprise connectivity.

What do these layoffs signify for legacy network solutions?

MPLS is dying a slow death. It’s a slow death because cloud adoption is speeding up. While MPLS remains the most widely-used secure connectivity solution at the enterprise level, it offers little to no connectivity solutions to applications hosted in the cloud.

Last year, traffic over the enterprise WAN grew by 200% – and 50% of that traffic was generated by cloud platforms and SaaS applications. This was especially pronounced in the Asia-Pacific region, which grew by 250%, where US- and EMEA-based businesses are now expanding globally, and more APAC-based businesses are cropping up as well.

According to the 2017 State of the WAN Report, enterprise WAN traffic grew by an average 200% worldwide.

In addition, bandwidth consumption is at an all-time high, and shows no sign of stopping. In order to compensate for the growth in traffic, as well as solve for issues like packet loss, which can occur when there is congestion across a link, enterprises are investing in larger and larger links.

Legacy solutions like MPLS, however, can’t keep up. It is slow to deploy and scale, meaning that larger links take weeks or months to spin up. MPLS also can’t provide cloud/SaaS connectivity without workarounds, like backhauling (which, incidentally, degrades the quality of the connection and requires more workarounds, like WAN Optimization).

Solutions like Aryaka, which deliver SD-WAN and WAN Optimization built into a purpose-built global private network, have provided the first steps toward an end to the dependency on MPLS by creating a true full replacement to the outdated legacy model.

These layoffs signal the beginning of the end – if the solution no longer serves the needs of the enterprise, why keep investing your IT budget and resources in it?

What do these layoffs mean for network admins?

As MPLS becomes less and less viable as an option for global connectivity, business leaders will turn to network admins for their expertise and guidance on what next to implement. Admins with the training and support in implementing and maintaining next-generation networking have the opportunity to leverage this expertise to grow in their roles and with the company.

Those who continue to push for and lean on legacy technologies because they’re simply “the way things have always been done,” will find that they must play catch-up in terms of industry knowledge and applicable skills once MPLS fully sunsets.

Industry knowledge is leaning toward applications over networks. Cloud computing has become an industry standard. With MPLS out of the picture, networks delivered as a service will become more ubiquitous, meaning that admins will have to spend less time with support tickets relating to speed and performance on the network itself. Instead, as enterprises shift their business- and mission-critical applications into virtual deployments, admins will spend more time optimizing the deployment and delivery of these as-a-service platforms and programs.

All of this supposes, of course, that a next generation solution can take over where MPLS left off – which is exactly what Aryaka’s Managed SD-WAN does.

A Global SD-WAN with a WAN

Aryaka Global SD-WAN

Aryaka provides everything both IT leaders and their enterprises need to succeed in the fast-approaching future of networking. Although, from the way in which the SD-WAN market is taking off, the future of networking appears to already be here.)

With a purpose-built WAN delivered as a service, Aryaka provides global enterprises with a software-defined MPLS replacement built on 28 points of presence located within 30 ms of 95% of the world’s business users.

Built into that WAN are SD-WAN and WAN Optimization, so there is no CapEx and no additional management required. Aryaka also provides 24/7 support for the network, freeing up network admins to focus on the skills and tasks that matter to their careers: application management. Aryaka makes that even easier by providing up to 40x improvement of application performance.

So – are more Massive Painful Layoffs in Store in the legacy networking space? Signs point to “yes,” if businesses choose to stick with legacy WAN solutions such as MPLS. But we invite you to choose a different path and see how Aryaka can evolve your career. Sign up for a proof of concept and see what Aryaka can do for your enterprise.

About the author

Gary Sevounts

Gary Sevounts is the Chief Marketing Officer at Aryaka Networks, and is responsible for Aryaka’s global marketing efforts. He has extensive experience with software and SaaS products in the IT infrastructure and security space, as well as marketing and sales technology, having held marketing and product management leadership roles with a number of industry leaders.