The advent of globalisation has meant WANs have become a major artery for communication between remote offices and customers in all parts of the world. Consolidation of assets and systems has also seen applications moving to centralised data centres and clouds. Therefore, WANs play an even more critical role, because businesses are wholly dependent on availability and performance of their networks.
MPLS not always the cost-effective solution
Previously the only way to achieve reliable connectivity with predictable performance was to take advantage of a private WAN using MPLS or leased line service. However, carrier-based MPLS and leased line services aren’t always cost-effective for an organisation to use for WAN transport – in order to support their growing bandwidth requirements for remote-site connectivity. In parallel organisations are constantly looking for ways to improve on operating costs while ensuring provision of network transport for a remote site such as a regional office or production site.
As bandwidth demands have increased, the Internet has become a much more stable platform, and the price-to-performance gains are very attractive. However, businesses primarily deploy “Internet as WAN” in their smaller sites or as a backup path because of the risks. This cost-effective, performance-enhancing opportunity now can be realised across a business’ whole estate using Cisco’s Intelligent WAN (IWAN) – more widely known as Dynamic Multipoint Virtual Private Network (DMVPN)
Savings and freeing up resources
IWAN enables organisations to deliver an un-compromised experience over any connection. IT organisations can provide more bandwidth to their branch office connections using less expensive WAN transport options without affecting performance, security, or reliability. With the IWAN solution, traffic is dynamically routed based on application SLA, endpoint type and network conditions in order to deliver the best quality experience. The realised savings from IWAN not only pay for infrastructure upgrades, but also frees resources for further business innovation.