The legacy enterprise WAN was built for an era where applications were all hosted in one, or at most two data centers of the enterprise. The network connected all of the locations to the data center. We live in a world today where, a typical enterprise consumes a combination of applications that are hosted in its data center and in the public cloud like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, or simply as a software as a service (SaaS) that can be hosted anywhere in the world.

The legacy WAN is an anomaly in the world of cloud driven enterprise infrastructure.

The compute and the storage costs, have significantly reduced by moving to a pay as much you consume model. The WAN that connects the enterprise locations and the users in them to the applications, has been stuck in the old world. The legacy WAN was built for a world of client-server applications. While most of the applications have moved to the cloud, the cloud itself has become a center piece of the policy breaches that enterprise encounters today. The legacy WAN was not built to seamlessly extend it to the cloud, allowing the enterprise IT to extend the same policies that they have enforced on physical locations, be it branch offices or data center, to the virtual world in the cloud.

Enterprise expects its WAN to enable high speed consumption of applications, irrespective of where those applications are and from where those applications are accessed. With the adoption of SaaS and Cloud growing at a rapid pace, Enterprise requires more internet bandwidth rather than bandwidth to its data centers. It requires high quality bandwidth at each location without the hassles of feasibility at those locations. It requires a SD-WAN that can mix the legacy world of MPLS that connected its locations to its data centers with internet at each location.

The enterprise needs to create a uniform network from multiple of types of bandwidth – private bandwidth in the form of a MPLS circuit or internet bandwidth, from any service provider.The enterprise IT also needs to enable uniform policies and governance across all physical and virtual locations, creating a SD-WAN that complies to the standards and policies.

It empowers the enterprise with the ability to increase the network bandwidth at a location or across locations without having to go through the hassles of feasibility or the wait till the existing service provider increases the provisioned capacity at a location. It enables the enterprise to use locally available bandwidth from multiple service providers – giving it the leverage to use the best quality bandwidth at the lowest possible cost.

MPLS Replacement

Aspirare SD-WAN is an effective replacement for MPLS circuits. It provides a cost effective way for an enterprise to gradually migrate their WAN to an internet based WAN without having to rip and replace the existing MPLS based WAN. While the enterprise can choose to implement a native SD-WAN without any MPLS, it becomes a tedious process for the enterprise to close the existing multi-year contracts for a MPLS WAN with service providers. Also, enterprises may have several thousands of locations that are already connected on a MPLS based WAN and may choose to try SD-WAN at a select set of locations to begin with.

Aspirare SD-WAN allows the enterprise the feasibility of terminating MPLS circuits along with an internet link to create a truly hybrid network. The solution also allows deployment of the SD-WAN at a select set of locations initially while the remaining locations remain on an existing MPLS based WAN.

Deployment

Aspirare SD-WAN takes the simplicity of WAN deployment with SD-WAN to the next level.

The deployment options allow an enterprise to consume the network just like compute or storage in the public cloud, as a service. In this model, the network subscription covers the software with the CloudStation SD-WAN controller running as a multi-tenant instance in the cloud.

The enterprise can also choose to use a single tenant instance with the controller running on a public cloud. enterprises with a large private data center that are at the cusp of cloud adoption can opt to deploy the CloudStation controller as a virtual or a physical appliance in the data center.