Written by Zabrina Doerck, Director of Product Marketing at Infovista
If your business is like most these days, the operational heartbeat of
your company-and in many ways, its success-depends more and more on the apps
you use. Customer-facing digital experiences. Internal corporate apps you rely on
for basic operations. A growing number of cloud-hosted apps that fuel
everything from sales to supply chain to collaboration to HR. Poll your users
though, and you'll find that, despite these apps playing such a critical role
in your business, the actual experience using them is often... not great.
Enterprise apps that are central to basic operations run sluggishly or
get hung up at unpredictable times. Videoconferencing and multimedia apps that
worked fine one day get choppy or lose connectivity the next. In the worst
cases, customer-facing commerce, inventory or customer service apps cut out
unexpectedly, frustrating your customers and, potentially, eroding your bottom
line.
You may have tried throwing more bandwidth at the problem but found
that these issues persist. You may have even adopted a software-defined
wide-area network (SD-WAN) solution, thinking it would improve app performance,
but haven't gotten the results you expected. What's going on here? Let's run
through some possibilities:
- Cloud is introducing variability. There's
a reason analysts expect 83%
of enterprise workloads to be in the cloud by 2020: the cloud makes it
easier to access and manage applications. At the same time, the more you
rely on cloud apps, the more your business is at the mercy of your WAN. If
you're still routing all cloud traffic through a central data center, for
example, you're introducing significant latency. This is one of the major
drivers of SD-WAN adoption-the ability to break out cloud traffic at local
branches and route it directly over the Internet. Now though, you're
relying on a mix of Internet connections and dedicated WAN links to
support different locations and services. This introduces new complexities
and variability from one session to the next that your WAN was never designed
to cope with.
- App optimization is optimizing the
wrong apps. Many businesses have invested in application acceleration-another
key driver for (and expected benefit of) SD-WAN. Unfortunately, most SD-WAN
solutions don't provide the flexibility or granularity to truly control
app performance over dynamic modern WANs. Typically, they prioritize all
traffic of a given type or from a specific app, a blunt-instrument
approach that can easily go awry. It's common, for example, to find some users
seeing lags and disconnects when trying to log onto an important
videoconference, while others stream HD YouTube without a hiccup. What's
happening? The SD-WAN is indeed optimizing your apps. But you have more
and more of them, all competing for bandwidth, and it's optimizing the
wrong ones.
- Important business apps require consistent
performance that your network can't provide. Many businesses are
investing in digital transformation initiatives, like deploying new
Internet of Things (IoT) apps on factory floors or digital kiosks at
retail sites. But too often, those initiatives don't pay off as expected.
Maintenance costs aren't really going down. Retail sales conversions are
flat or even declining. Often, the problem is that new digital apps
require a consistent baseline level of performance that the network can't
maintain. So, the benefits of these initiatives end up being far slower to
materialize, or-in particularly egregious cases-new tools get abandoned
because the user experience is so frustrating.
- Unpredictable high-volume traffic flows
are overwhelming transactional flows. Along the same lines,
innovative businesses are expanding their use of machine learning and
artificial intelligence to fuel real-time analytics and automated
decision-making. But "real-time" here is key; if a real-time data stream
gets backed up, you can see all sorts of unexpected behavior in
higher-level applications. Often, businesses attempt to solve this problem
by adding bandwidth. But this isn't a bandwidth issue; most real-time data
flows are relatively small. The problem is, they're getting overwhelmed by
occasional high-volume flows (like large file transfers), and a fatter
pipe won't help.
Reimagining the WAN
These are all serious issues, and you're likely to see more of them as
you rely on apps to run more aspects of your business. Making matters worse, in
most cases, adding more bandwidth-the first approach many enterprises
employ-won't help. Because the answer to these problems isn't adding more capacity;
it's adding more intelligence.
The fact is, WANs have worked largely the same way for decades, even as
the number of apps running over enterprise networks, and the demands placed on
them, have exploded. What's needed now is more sophisticated traffic-handling
intelligence, so your network understands what individual users and apps are doing,
and how important those activities are to your business. Ideally, you'd like
your WAN to automatically prioritize traffic based on business priorities end
to end. It's called "intent-based networking." And it's where WANs need to go
in an app-driven world.
A Smarter SD-WAN
As the new nerve center for the enterprise network, SD-WANs are in
prime position to fix most of the problems plaguing app experiences. But the
first generation of SD-WAN solutions were built to address network capacity and
costs-not application performance. In some cases, SD-WAN even made
things worse, because businesses were now trying to manage traffic over a mix
of different types of circuits in different locations, only some of which
supported quality-of-service (QoS).
Today, new solutions can address what most businesses consider the most
important aspect of their WAN: the experience for people using it. Built
specifically to optimize app performance for every user, a smart SD-WAN should
deliver three core capabilities:
-
QoS prioritization over all connections:
New SD-WANs provide a logical overlay to rationalize all the various WAN
connections that business now use. They can provide true end-to-end
prioritization to control traffic flows in more granular, context-aware ways.
-
Adaptable queues: Knowing which apps
should be prioritized is a start, but it's not enough. The network also needs
to see when changing traffic patterns are diminishing the user experience in
unacceptable ways. That requires dynamic QoS queues that can adjust to changing
conditions in real time. If there's a spike in usage of a high-priority app,
for example, new SD-WANs can recognize that and allocate more bandwidth until
conditions normalize.
-
Session-based intelligence: Where
first-gen SD-WANs provided basic prioritization based on traffic types, modern
solutions get far more granular. They're able to monitor the performance
experienced by individual users, and they optimize quality on a
session-by-session basis.
With capabilities like these, businesses can solve the biggest issues
making app experiences so unpredictable. And they can ensure that, as more mission-critical
business runs on apps, their networks provide a great experience for every
user, every time.
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About the Author
Zabrina Doerck, Director of Product Marketing
Zabrina directs product marketing strategy for
Infovista's Ipanema SD-WAN portfolio. With more than 15 years' experience in
the B2B SaaS/IaaS market, Zabrina is an evangelist for best-in-class enterprise
technology solutions that deliver quality customer experiences and drive
profitability. Prior to joining Infovista, Zabrina led marketing strategy for
SD-WAN, Cloud and Managed Services at Comcast Business, a Global Fortune 100
company. Zabrina also brings unique vertical insights from past roles with
leading data center and global medical SaaS companies, with special expertise
in manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and finance.