We had it pretty good when MPLS came to market. It was fast, secure, and reliable. But it could have been better, and it was expensive. So, we developed SDWAN to allow us to use inexpensive public transport. Nice and affordable. Unfortunately, we lost the fast, secure, and reliable thing with public transport. But if we added tunnels to encrypt our traffic, we clawed back security. Fast and reliable? Not so much.
If you remember, even though MPLS offered guaranteed delivery for applications and was fast, dependable, and secure, it wasn’t flawless. Route-by-route assurances of availability, packet loss, and low latency were supported with integrated billing, management, and SLAs. Although all of this was fantastic, the cost was prohibitive. According to the common consensus, as we shifted away from data centers and toward the cloud and SaaS, MPLS was no longer required for businesses and the enterprise network.
We had it pretty good when MPLS came to market. It was fast, secure, and reliable. But it could have been better, and it was expensive. So, we developed SDWAN to allow us to use inexpensive public transport. Nice and affordable. Unfortunately, we lost the fast, secure, and reliable thing with public transport. But if we added tunnels to encrypt our traffic, we clawed back security. Fast and reliable? Not so much.
If you remember, even though MPLS offered guaranteed delivery for applications and was fast, dependable, and secure, it wasn’t flawless. Route-by-route assurances of availability, packet loss, and low latency were supported with integrated billing, management, and SLAs. Although all of this was fantastic, the cost was prohibitive. According to the common consensus, as we shifted away from data centers and toward the cloud and SaaS, MPLS was no longer required for businesses and the enterprise network.
To take advantage of the accessibility and cheaper bandwidth of public transport, businesses began implementing software-defined wide area networks (SDWAN) around 2012. SDWAN initially aided in affordability but needed to be more reliable. Tunneling was required between each edge to achieve secure connections.
The biggest problem with SDWAN is that it uses a public network or public internet. Even worse, the organization has neither visibility nor control over that network. And the route that the traffic uses to traverse the network varies. While MPLS has a private network, using SD-WAN over the public internet is like traveling through the digital desert. Creating and maintaining the SDWAN overlay also resulted in a tremendous operational load. Enterprises struggled to establish a dependable, secure, and safe network over public transport.
It was an uneasy communion. Over time, what we had hoped would be the perfect blend of fast, secure, reliable, AND affordable devolved into fast, secure, reliable, a bear to maintain, and way too expensive.
So, how do we fix this? Remember, we want fast, secure, reliable, AND affordable. The answer is to blend the BEST parts of MPLS with public internet broadband.
But what does that mean? Two things …
Private. MPLS is fast, secure, and reliable for a simple reason. It’s private! Any next-gen solution must be private to be fast, secure, and reliable.
As-a-service. Public internet broadband is affordable and easy to maintain for a simple reason – you consume it as-a-Service. Have you heard of the cloud? Hello! You cannot be easy and affordable if you design, purchase, and maintain physical hardware.
So, how can enterprises combine the performance, reliability, security, and functionality of MPLS with the affordability and agility of SDWAN? Simple –replace the “digital wilderness” with an MPLS-class private network. But this time, with a private network that retains the flexibility and agility of the public internet.
In the end, fast, secure, reliable, AND affordable aren’t that difficult. Just blend an MPLS network’s “private” essence with the affordable, agile essence of public internet broadband. And just like that, Graphiant has done it, bringing you the fast, secure, reliable, and affordable network you’ve been yearning for since 2010, And it is here today.