You only have to look around you to see how the service delivery landscape is changing. Organisations of all sizes are now choosing to effectively outsource service delivery for a wide range of the tools that users need to go about their day.
With anything from Line of Business shadow IT subscribing to an ‘aaS’ that has become their #1 productivity tool to over 1 billion Office 365 users, the services we consume are no longer hosted exclusively in a single location. They move data outside the traditional network perimeter which raises the question about the constraints of legacy Wide Area Networks (WANs) and the effects they have on user productivity.
Squeezing an increasing volume of data down an already congested MPLS to provide internet breakout at the data centre can have disastrous effects on user experience. Packet inspection, encryption and general network connectivity conditions can easily add enough latency to traffic flows that call quality degrades, video becomes choppy, searches take too long searching and downloads take an eternity.
Old school WANs can’t keep up, the services we all consume are changing so it‘s time to change the way we think about networks.