IDG Contributor Network: Winds of change blowing in the WAN

In the past few years, enterprise computing has experienced major upheavals brought about by cloud apps, Wi-Fi, mobility, and BYOD. The enterprise WAN, meanwhile, has not evolved much since it was transformed into an MPLS Layer 3 VPN infrastructure more than a decade ago. Things are about change. Based on my experience with customer deployments, more than 50% of enterprise traffic from branches is currently Internet-bound. This is due to outsourcing of utility applications, including email, search, voice, video and collaboration, not to mention cloud application use. Despite this trend, enterprises have resisted using the public Internet to provide remote offices with direct access to cloud applications. This is primarily due to compliance issues, especially in the financial and healthcare industries. Doing so would require extensive security policies at each location and would introduce a management nightmare. The alternative, backhauling traffic to the corporate DMZ, is not feasible. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here