Can a Global SD-WAN Replace MPLS Connectivity?
Recently, Aryaka held a webinar on Choosing an SD-WAN for Global Enterprise Applications. According to IDC, the SD-WAN market is expected to reach $1.19 billion, as enterprises are looking to solve global network challenges created by the increase in mobile users, globalization, and especially the migration of mission-critical applications moving to the cloud.
However, a few global enterprises still host their own applications in the local data center.
One business with this particular scenario asked in our webinar asked if a global SD-WAN would be a good option to replace MPLS Connectivity.
To recap here are the major issues with MPLS when it comes to global connectivity.
- MPLS is expensive: you have to not only deal with tens of contracts from multiple telcos to build a global network, but you have to install hardware at the edge of each branch office to maintain it all, plus enlist an army of IT administrators around the world to manage it all.
- MPLS takes months to deploy: Depending on where your businesses resides around the world, MPLS can take from 3-6 months (sometimes longer) to deploy. This slows down the productivity of your business along with the time it takes to execute a project.
- MPLS is not designed for cloud and SaaS connectivity: Even if your mission-critical applications are still hosted on-premises, if a cloud strategy is projected for the future, only 2% of cloud/SaaS applications offer direct connectivity through MPLS. Your business would have to rely on the public Internet to access these cloud-hosted applications which are plagued with latency, packet loss, and jitter.
And that is why Aryaka’s global SD-WAN is the only viable MPLS alternative for enterprises with a worldwide presence.
Aryaka’s global SD-WAN displaces that private network requirement and allows our customers to leverage internet at their edge to on-ramp to an MPLS-grade private network with access to every cloud and SaaS application. Now any business can have a single connection where there is a path to Aryaka for corporate applications in the local data center, over IP sec. The other recreational traffic just exits to the Internet, and can be protected by an additional security layer or existing firewall at the edge.
Should the desire come to migrate from the corporate data center into cloud and SaaS based applications origins, Aryaka already has those connections built-in. We already have the express routes, we have the cross connects, we have the global cloud exchange connections to get you to your cloud and SaaS based application origins.
In many cases, we actually enable the migration. For example, say you need to move applications from the data center to AWS. You can scale bandwidth down at the data center and increase it at the Amazon application origin, and treat those equally from a performance and reliability standard using Aryaka that previously I expected compromise and I was concerned about what the user experience would be, and making that migration, we eliminate that comprise. Now you have a platform at your fingertips that you can do anything with to any application origin, no matter what changes come about.
Global enterprises do not have to feel trapped by MPLS if they have to host their apps in the data center. Having a global SD-WAN offers you the flexibility to connect on-premises or in the cloud, migrate data and applications to the cloud seamlessly, and also deploy a global network in days or hours, all as a fully managed service.
When it comes to delivering any application to anywhere in the world, we have a set of tools at your fingertips that are very empowering for our customers and it all comes back to that agility and being able to respond to the business. Most definitely come to talk to us about that.
If you are coast to coast, come talk to us. You are not required to cross oceans or continents to reap the benefits of our global SD-WAN. That’s also an exciting conversation to have.
To learn more, watch our on-demand version of the webinar here.
About the author
