Vendors from Aryaka and Pertino to Cisco and incumbent carriers wish to shake up your wide area world. Here’s why you’ll want to allow them to.
The cloud’s capacity to upend long-standing IT practices — and vendor business models — knows no bounds. Having changed how it organizations deliver applications and infrastructure, cloud services at the moment are changing the way in which they design, deploy, and manage wide area networks.
That change is coming none too soon for respondents to the InformationWeek 2014 Next-Generation WAN Survey. Though 68% of respondents see demand for WAN bandwidth increasing (versus 34% who said so in our 2012 survey), just 15% are bringing new services or more capacity online now. Given the lead time to provision WAN links, we wonder just why they’re waiting.
Enter a brand new wave of vendors, from newcomers reminiscent of Aryaka, Glue Networks, and Pertino to titans similar to Cisco, all trying to the cloud to seriously change your WAN. Through the use of a brand new generation of services inbuilt co-located hubs and delivered over the net, they target to do for networks what Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com have done for computing and packaged applications: add speed and versatility and, just maybe, cut costs.
That’s key; after we asked about satisfaction with a dozen features in their WAN services, respondents rated cost dead last, as usual. One respondent last year asked: “Shouldn’t there be a Moore’s Law of WAN connectivity?” A network analyst responding to our latest survey said his local government finally got bored to death and built its own WAN. “Incumbents were unwilling to either build it or collaborate with us to construct it on a split-cost basis.”
“Service providers in our area — AT&T, TWC, CenturyLink — are all insensitive to our needs.” Most organizations won’t have that DIY option. Fortunately, cloud-based WANs can piggyback on ubiquitous, inexpensive ISP circuits. Some offerings automate configuration and administration of all manner of WAN equipment, from branch office routers to security appliances. Other products go even further by letting IT organizations replace complex and costly MPLS, T1, or optical (DWDM) circuits with an online-based private WAN. Another new network service category builds a multiparty VPN within the cloud, eliminating the setup headaches of conventional SSL, L2TP, or IPsec VPNs while letting remote clients (soon to incorporate mobile devices) simultaneously join multiple private clouds.
If you are not investigating those offerings, try to be.
Go-fast helpers
Also at the rise is the share of respondents using WAN optimization or traffic shaping on some or most connections. That four points this year to 55%. Most wish to improve the performance of web applications. Others use WAN optimization to enhance bulk file transfers or break WAN bottlenecks, reduce total bandwidth consumption, and improve uptime.
Of those who’d want to upgrade their WANs but can’t, 26% say it is a matter of budget, while 54% say their organization has other priorities. WANs are one area where we tend to not play around once they’re built and dealing acceptably — something carriers assume.
But changes are coming. Nearly half (46%) of IT organizations surveyed by Nemertes Research say they’ve begun or plan to exchange expensive dedicated WAN circuits with Internet alternatives. In our own survey, 25% of respondents said they’re already using cloud-based enterprise WAN services over public Internet connections. Another 37% said they’re interested. Economies of scale let companies reminiscent of Google deliver symmetric Gigabit Ethernet for $70 monthly. Why wouldn’t you be curious?
Cloud Networking 101
The cloud is changing WANs in two important ways: how distributed networks are managed and the way they’re delivered.
The first change amounts to a software-as-a-service solution to network administration, whereby management consoles and device configuration screens sit in a cloud service, are accessed via browsers, and use web APIs to push changes to remote network equipment. This approach, described as cloud-enabled networks, was pioneered by wireless LAN vendors seeking to streamline the configuration and administration of thousands of distributed access points, but it is usually applied to branch office routers, VPN gateways, and other security appliances.
The second change entails delivering private network services over a public utility. Though cloud services inherently depend upon the net, they’re obviously not all public services. Companies have tunneled private traffic over the net using VPNs for years. Much as Salesforce and Workday use the cloud to deliver dedicated instances of enterprise applications, companies which includes Aryaka and Pertino now deliver network-as-a-service offerings. The backbone of these offerings is the net, not private point-to-point or MPLS circuits, but with capabilities much like conventional private WANs.
As with all online services, the manager NaaS bugaboo is data security. It is a top concern of 78% of the respondents to our survey, followed by service availability and reliability, at 48%. (Respondents were allowed to pick out a couple of option.) Maybe reports of the NSA snooping on traffic moving between Google and Yahoo datacenters nudged that number up, but our take is that “Not secure” is a Pavlovian IT pro response to the word “cloud.” After we asked in our survey which three features are most enticing in a WAN service, only 21% cited end-to-end data encryption. What’s considered way more important than encryption, client VPNs, and edge redundancy? Lower capital and operational costs and simplicity and speed of deployment.
Our takeaway: Money and convenience trump security and reliability each time, lip service notwithstanding. So let’s start being honest with ourselves.
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