(Newswire.net — May 28, 2019) — Agility and security are two of the most important aspects of modern IT. Businesses that aren’t agile enough to keep up fall behind. Businesses that aren’t secure enough to stay ahead of threats suffer data breaches and damaged reputations.
It is no surprise then, that solutions that tout the ability to enhance agility or security for an enterprise’s WAN garner a lot of attention. WAN optimization remains a priority for CTOs and CIOs across the globe. Solutions such as NFV (network functions virtualization) have received a lot of attention lately, as the idea of virtualizing network functions onto commodity servers is enticing to many. However, enterprises that have used NFV have remained burdened with many of the same management challenges that users of hardware appliances faced.
This then begs the questions: how can you sort through the hype and see what value NFV really adds? Are there solutions available that can deliver better results today?
In this piece, we’ll dive into the promise vs reality of NFV and explain how a converged solution like SDWaaS is better suited to deliver optimal WAN performance at scale.
NFV hype vs reality
Many enterprises are realizing that managing CPE (customer premise equipment) at scale can be complex and costly. Deploying an engineer to troubleshoot problems onsite is inefficient and expensive. Further, waiting for hardware creates bottlenecks in provisioning and workflows that can negatively impact operations.
NFV is a solution that theoretically helps address this problem by enabling enterprises to run virtual CPEs. That is, with NFV you can take multiple network functions that were once achieved by multiple discrete CPE appliances and run them on a single commodity server. Doing this for your router, firewall, WAN optimizer, and other WAN appliances saves a fair amount of capex.
However, as NFV scales, the same management problem arises. Regardless of whether the routers and firewalls are on hardware appliances or a virtual appliances, if there are hundreds of them across hundreds of sites, management is time consuming. For example, while the virtualized nature of NFV may make checking for and patching security vulnerabilities easier than with only hardware appliances, it is still a difficult task to manage across hundreds of virtual appliances. In other words, while NFV can lead to some reduction in capex and opex, management remains a challenge.
The takeaway is clear: in practice, NFV doesn’t lead to huge strides in terms of agility or cost savings. This is because NFV hasn’t shifted the paradigm away from a disjointed, site-by-site approach to network optimization, management, and security. As a result, the benefits gained from NFV are usually marginal, not game changing.
How SDWaaS is different
Managing discrete appliances isn’t just inefficient, it can be insecure as it increases the likelihood of a misconfiguration or oversight that leads to a breach. So, if simply shifting to a software-defined approach to WAN optimization and management isn’t going to lead to significantly improved experiences on the WAN, what is? The answer is simple: a solution that is converged and holistic.
This is where SDWaaS comes in. SDWaaS is a cloud-based WAN solution with an SLA-backed private backbone and built-in network security stack. What this means for enterprises is that they can centralize WAN security and WAN management. Not only does this lead to reduced spend on hardware appliances, it solves the problem of managing, monitoring, and maintaining a fleet of appliances across multiple sites.
Further, the cloud-based nature of SDWaaS adds a level of elasticity and agility that CPE appliances, virtual or physical, simply cannot match. Onboarding new sites with SDWaaS can occur in minutes or hours. This simply isn’t within reach when you have to source and provision multiple appliances.
While NFV had the right idea by virtualizing network functions, it missed the mark in leaving the appliances on-premises. To enable enterprise-level scalability, the functions need to be decoupled from physical sites and moved to the cloud. Doing so enables enterprises to fully leverage the benefits of virtualization and software-defined infrastructure. As is, NFV hamstrings enterprises by spreading the management and configuration burden across all the locations in a WAN. This in turn limits an enterprises agility and ability to quickly spin up and spin down services. With SDWaaS, you get all the benefits of enterprise grade WAN management and security appliances in the cloud. This centralized approach enables agility and scalability that NFV simply cannot match.
Integrated solutions enable optimization of the enterprise WAN
As we have seen, the fundamental flaw in NFV is the same as with physical CPE appliances: at scale, they add too much complexity to a WAN. At the enterprise level, managing multiple sites with hundreds of discrete appliances becomes unwieldy and inefficient.
On the other hand, SDWaaS offers enterprises a solution that integrates management and security to one holistic solution. This converged approach is much more conducive to scalability and optimization. As a result, enterprises that adopt SDWaaS are better positioned to optimize, secure, and manage their WAN.