How times have changed and why it’s time to “Evolve IT”

The WAN has always been about connecting users to applications and moving data, but the playing field has now changed with datacenters migrating to the cloud along with missioncritical applications. Companies are increasingly moving away from traditional applications and the notion of a location is changing. Ultimately the way that enterprises and their users do business has changed - and so must their approach to connectivity.

Gartner predicts that by 2018 SaaS will become the dominant model for consuming application functionality for approximately 80% of all organizations1. So how will your MPLS solution stand up to the flexibility, agility, insight and control needed for the new world of “connect anywhere to anything” at Cloud speed? Can it do all of this and compete at the price of a broadband Internet connection? Read on to find out.

Flexibility

Once you are committed to MPLS, the ability to leverage your broadband appears to be an impossibility that is unapproachable due to security and reliability concerns. However, the pain of getting remote offices up and running through service providers results in severe downtime – affecting the bottom line. The challenge is to improve on the performance of your end users, as well as the time to market.

What if you could rapidly and non-disruptively augment or replace your MPLS network with any form of Internet connectivity?

Silver Peak delivers flexibility by allowing enterprises to non-disruptively augment or replace their MPLS networks with any form of Internet connectivity. With Silver Peak, Unity EdgeConnect, customers can move to a Broadband WAN – often referred to a Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) – at their own pace or via a hybrid approach. With a zero-touch deployment model, customers do not require significant manual support. Additionally, as a virtual WAN overlay solution, connectivity decisions can be made independent of carriers, avoiding lengthy procurement and deployment delays.

Visibility

While the growing number of SaaS applications and cloud services being accessed by employees improves costs and productivity, it also leads to a lack of understanding on what is going on across the network. IT has traditionally struggled with enabling the user without losing visibility and control of what applications and bandwidth are being used.

What if you had unprecedented levels of visibility into both legacy and cloud applications – and regain control?

Silver Peak provides visibility into all applications being leveraged by end-users and allows them to report and action on inappropriate usage. Through the Unity Orchestrator, IT can monitor performance, monitoring alarms, alerts, and network path metrics. It even includes an end-user oriented metrics reporting function that reveals application usage and network metrics including bandwidth, utilization, latency and loss.

Control

With the wide adoption of cloud services and users utilizing valuable bandwidth for often non-work related usage, the need for control is critical. A global management system is a key requirement when managing an SD-WAN fabric, eliminating redundancy, increasing efficiency and allowing IT to make changes from anywhere on any device.

What if you could achieve centralized management and orchestration for control – managing your bandwidth, applications and usage at the click of a button?

Silver Peak’s Unity Orchestrator provides a single screen from which to rapidly turn up offices in bulk and implement network-wide business-intent policies, eliminating the need to make complex and error–prone policy changes at every branch. The visibility features gives you powerful insight into your network, and lets you prioritize applications that need heightened network accessibility. Furthermore, you can control your traffic by restricting application usage and designating permissions to access specific non-critical applications across the enterprise.

Performance

Ultimately, a happy and productive workforce leads to success. Performance of users, applications and data accessibility ultimately leads to a competitive advantage – something that all enterprises strive for. However, as organizations adopt a cloud application strategy, performance can be degraded – as the network wasn’t designed to efficiently access applications outside of the data center. Often times applications are accessed easier from a home broadband connection than at the office.

What if you could leverage the Internet more effectively, without sacrificing performance and give employees the same working experience wherever they are located?

Silver Peak’s Unity EdgeConnect includes features such as path conditioning and path selection that ensure private line-like performance over the Internet or other less pristine networks. It reduces and even eliminates dropped and out-of-order packets. The optional Unity Boost performance pack can provide an additional level of increased performance and lowered perceived latency where and when you need it. The Unity Cloud Intelligence service delivers real-time updates on the best performance path to reach hundreds of SaaS applications providing users with the fastest, most intelligent way to access their work.

Savings

Enterprise IT is very aware of the high cost and inflexibility of MPLS, but often does not realize that there is another option that can reduce this dependency. The connectivity, equipment and network administration costs quickly add up – a company with 100 offices may pay out more than $2 million a year. In addition, while organizations patiently wait for service providers to establish MPLS connection to new branch offices or make any changes, their businesses are losing money by the minute.

What if you could non-disruptively introduce a new WAN solution that reduces your MPLS-related costs by up to 90%?

Silver Peak’s Unity EdgeConnect enables you to easily and securely leverage broadband for your WAN. By creating a virtual WAN overlay, customers do not have to overhaul their existing WAN investments. You can continue with your existing MPLS service and gradually introduce new carriers and access technologies in a particular office or region as business realities dictate. Less-critical or bandwidth-hungry applications can be migrated over to broadband, taking advantage of its low costs. This simplified WAN architecture with zero-touch deployment significantly lowers branch equipment CAPEX and operational costs.