SD-WAN

The cloud is all around us. Applications are now being distributed between in-house data centres, public clouds and SaaS providers. And the exponential growth of connected devices is driving the quest for ever better end-user experiences. Traditional WAN’s can no longer keep pace. It’s time for a new generation of networking.

SD-WAN (Software Defined Wide Area Networking) meets the challenges to modern technology delivery.

SD-WAN combines two technologies:

1. 1. Software Defined Networking (SDN), designed for cloud datacenters.
2. 2. Wide Area Networking (WAN) – the network outside your office: e.g. the Internet, or a site-to-site network like MPLS or Metro Ethernet.

By applying the advantages of cloud computing to the management of WANs, SD-WAN simplifies, streamlines and centralises the management of your network via a single cloud-based console.

In short, SD-WAN automatically prioritises bandwidth allocation based on your business needs, routing traffic along the most efficient path and scaling your network's bandwidth up and down as required.

It allows you to quickly reconfigure bandwidth when and where required, so forget about waiting for an on-site engineer to implement changes at a local network level. SD-WAN gives you the capability to react, adapt and make complex networking decisions in minutes rather than weeks.

SD-WAN also allows you to enhance or replace legacy networks such as MPLS with a new generation of secure, cloud-optimised, Internet-enabled connectivity. The result? Application-focused, user-centric networks optimised for your digital and cloud strategy.

Our managed SD-WAN services deliver the scale, the performance and the agility to support your evolving networking needs now and in the future.

Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) was designed to ensure reliable connections for real-time applications. Providing a unified data-carrying service for both circuit-based and packet-switching clients, it supports a range of technologies rather than being tied to any one in particular.

So how does it work? In a traditional IP network, each router performs an IP lookup to determine a next-hop based on its routing table. The router then forwards the packet to that next-hop and so on until it reaches the final destination.

By contrast, MPLS directs data between nodes based on short path labels rather than long network addresses. The first router still performs a lookup, but instead of a next-hop it identifies the final destination route and the path to get there. It then creates a path label incorporating this information which is used to route traffic without the need to perform additional complex IP lookups, speeding up traffic flows.

MPLS is hard to classify, sitting between Layer 2 (data link layer) and Layer 3 (network layer) on the OSI model. That’s why it is often referred to as a Layer 2.5 networking protocol.

The advantages? MPLS has always been considered to make efficient use of bandwidth, reduce network congestion and enhance the end-user experience.

At the same time, MPLS is far more expensive than sending traffic over the public Internet. It’s not easy to find a global service provider – important for companies expanding into new markets. But above all, MPLS simply wasn’t designed to meet the needs of today’s cloud-based businesses.