Should you be looking at direct internet connection?
Private MPLS WAN networks for Enterprise customers have long been the WAN connection of choice – providing dedicated bandwidth, QoS, reliability and tied to SLA’s. However lengthy delays in time to provision and the high cost of rental are concerns for Network managers, especially when IT budgets are being cut and savings being demanded.
Is there another way……
What about direct internet connection? business class internet is available and it provides high bandwidth, is widely available – it’s a very competitive space so new services, increasing bandwidth and lower costs are here now and will continue.
Cost comparison of MPLS circuits versus direct internet
Bear in mind that the average cost of a dedicated 3 Mbps MPLS circuit could cost three or four times as much as a 50 Mbps business class broadband Internet circuit – then these comparative costs focusses minds and has led to technology features being developed and delivered to take advantage of the availability, scalability and low costs that the internet offers today.
So how can you achieve high availability, reliability, scalability, application priority and a business quality end user experience across the internet – the answer is Cisco IWAN or Intelligent WAN
IWAN delivers a comprehensive set of traffic control features integrated into Cisco Branch Office Routers and Meraki MX Security Appliances.
With Cisco IWAN you will get a proven solution that scales to all branch-office sizes connected over the Internet. With rich application and security services on a single platform, you can scale to thousands of sites.
With the capabilities built in to maintain granular control of individual applications from the branch office to the data center and out to the public internet cloud – you can now confidently roll out critical business services such as voice, video, security, corporate and cloud applications using the Internet as your WAN.
How Cisco IWAN works
The Cisco iWAN solution is not only about clever routing of data across multiple WAN connections, it also delivers Application Optimisation (Wide Area Application Services WAAS) that identifies individual traffic streams and applies priority to them – so that your business critical traffic isn’t stuck behind someone looking at social media.
It also looks at the individual bits and bytes in the traffic streams and applies such smarts as data compression, data-redundancy and de-duplication – this saves the amount of traffic actually sent out on the WAN circuits.
These smarts additionally know how certain applications work – Enterprise Applications are often designed to be used in high speed LAN environments and are often very chatty – the IWAN solution optimise these applications so that they don’t consume WAN bandwidth unnecessarily.
Couple this with Akamai HTTP/S caching on the routers themselves so you don’t have to go out to the internet for most visited sites and content but have that served to you directly from the local router and you will see a massive improvement and enhancement in the end user experience in application performance when in the branch office.
But what about security… isn’t the internet open to everyone?
Well for inter-office communications the IWAN solution pushes all your sensitive business critical data in secure encrypted tunnels so that it cannot be snooped upon – but this is only for the traffic going between your branches and offices, other traffic will go straight out into the internet for Cloud based applications (if it needs to go to the internet and not to an internal destination then you wouldn’t want it using up your WAN bandwidth but you still want to be able to secure it). This is where you use Cisco Cloud Web Security (CWS) – Cisco CWS provides the security required to protect and secure your business assets when connecting directly to the internet from the branch offices and supplements the cost benefits delivered by the Intelligent WAN solution.
To summarise Cisco IWAN has the embedded intelligence to selectively determine where to send the branch traffic securely across any WAN transport whilst optimising the applications running in the branch office. It is neatly summed up in the graphic below.
If you have a Cisco Meraki IWAN branch solution then the same key deliverables are available to you too through the Cisco Meraki MX platforms
There are many compelling reasons to look at Cisco IWAN and Cisco Meraki IWAN to drive down costs and provide performance improvements necessary for the distributed Enterprise especially when adopting Cloud based services. Its time for the Intelligent Wide Area Network.
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