Moving away from MPLS: 5 key drivers for SD-WAN and SASE adoption
Many organizations that operate globally are looking to deploy an SD-WAN or SASE solution to augment their existing WAN infrastructure. Although their business reasons may vary, we’ve observed a number of common drivers. Below, we have a deep dive into each of them.
1. Cloud enablement
Enterprises are transforming their application and datacenter landscape, increasing business efficiency and agility by leveraging public and private SaaS, PaaS and IaaS services. Users, in turn, require new network services that provide instant support and top-notch performance. MPLS-based links cannot cope with this transition to the cloud, as they were designed simply to connect branch offices to enterprise data centers.
2. Address enterprise network traffic growth in a cost-efficient way
Enterprise network traffic is growing at an exponential pace, and leaders are looking for a cost-efficient way to address their future traffic growth. Adding more MPLS bandwidth is often cost-prohibitive. Traditional Internet-based or hybrid VPN solutions are complex to deploy and manage and do not provide the performance stability required for critical applications such as real-time voice or video.
3. Improve manageability
A single global provider and technology solution is not the right fit for all site requirements and geographic locations of an enterprise. Global MPLS pricing often is too high for small locations or countries with a large density of branch offices. The resulting mix of providers, in-house managed solutions and different types of technologies is complex to manage, and also requires in-depth technical skills within the organization.
4. Improve security
The enterprise network perimeter is dissolving. Users are working from home offices, employee mobility is increasing, enterprises are more and more interconnected with third parties and applications are moving to the cloud. Traditional perimeter-based security solutions such as MPLS are no longer sufficient to cope with new traffic flows that extrapolate enterprise perimeters. Enterprises need a solution that securely connects users to each other, to the Internet, and to cloud applications.
5. Increase flexibility & agility
Businesses are more agile than ever and IT teams are expected to deliver dynamic IT infrastructure services that support the increasing demands and expectations from the organization.
Traditional, static network solutions such as MPLS and Internet or hybrid VPNs are limited – adding new sites and applications, changing capacity requirements or shifting a software configuration takes a lot of time and demands in-depth technical knowledge, often with a qualified engineer on site.
SD-WAN and SASE answer modern businesses’ needs
Being software-defined and built-in and for the cloud, SD-WAN and SASE provide flexible, secure, optimized and cost-effective access to the cloud, users, applications and branch offices over any type of underlying connectivity, including the public Internet.
SD-WAN puts businesses in control, in the cloud. Virtualizing business networks – moving security, data, and applications into the cloud – can cut operational costs dramatically, while improving resource usage. SASE, in turn, provides the security necessary to make connectivity effective.
Understand if SASE and SD-WAN are right for you. Get in touch to talk to one of our experts today.