MPLS was designed for enterprises to access data center or applications at headquarters. With offices spread all over separate locations, enterprises commonly choose MPLS network to connect their offices at different locations. Therefore, their staffs can work, communicate, and share information easily, instantaneously, and effectively. However, since MPLS transport doesn’t have layer 3 routing capabilities, the traffic in and out of the branch offices need to go through the headend gateway at the service provider. This means all traffic, including general web traffic or any traffic destined to public cloud will have to go through the expensive MPLS backhaul for internet breakout. It is not addressing the performance challenges of cloud applications.
Simplified MPLS Network
MPLS was primarily designed to connect branches directly to data centers rather than access the internet. MPLS is obviously no longer sufficient for today’s enterprise requirements as there are more and more cloud-based applications adopted. Hybrid WAN solves this problem by enabling branch offices to directly access the cloud applications while keeping the access to the data center and headquarters. Organizations are increasingly taking on a hybrid WAN approach illustrated below, where broadband and MPLS connections are connected to branch networks at the same time.
Hybrid WAN
This helps in reducing bandwidth consumption of cloud applications on MPLS, and improving performance of cloud applications through direct internet access. However, there are still problems to be solved with the hybrid network design illustrated above.
Problems to be solved:
> No backup route for MPLS
> Inefficient bandwidth utilization.
> Application performance
> Possible security threats
Solution:Optimized Multi-Cloud Connectivity
> Virtualizing types of WAN transports into a single connection
> Intelligently steering traffic for critical applications
> Load balancing traffic across multiple WANs based on business policies
> Protecting network against security threats with inbuilt stateful firewall
> Data protection through military-grade tunnel encryption
Optimized Hybrid WAN Network
