The modern enterprise network is rapidly evolving as more and more cloud services become the predominant source for serving business applications and the end-user becomes increasingly mobile. IT executives now need to understand how to transform their global network to ensure that the client experience is simple and operates with low latency, while addressing the increasingly complex nature of security threats. We’ve noted a few of the more recent developments in this LAN vs WAN breakdown.
The traditional LAN, or Local Area Network, now includes a combination of high-speed wireless networking access points as well as dedicated Ethernet ports. Devices of all types accessing the LAN need to be immediately identified, classified, and reported to ensure that the IT teams are aware of all LAN-based activity before threats propagate across the WAN.
LAN access to the corporate WAN, or Wide Area Network, has rapidly evolved from your traditional layer 3 router to a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). The edge between the LAN vs WAN has become a demarcation point upon which multiple virtual network functions might reside, offering the security, applications visibility, routing, and switching capabilities required by the enterprise.
An obvious key component of a global WAN is the underlying network transport. MPLS has moved into the late maturity date on the technology life-cycle and more global SD-WAN deployments are leveraging IP Transit only. Selecting global ISPs can be tricky, but see our guide to leading Tier 1 ISPs here.
The Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) is now a predominate architecture for new network deployments.
Whereas the traditional MPLS or IP transit-based network was primarily a designed to provide “transport”, SD-WAN offers a layer of intelligence that can optimize routing and performance of applications across different transport types. Also with SD-WAN, network-based orchestration of functions simplifies deployment of private WAN nodes and offers visibility to each application.
The private WAN need not be a roadblock for your cloud-based applications, however. The team at Macronet Services has extensive experience designing, sourcing, and deploying global enterprise networks that leverage secure cloud gateways around the world to ensure that application performance is optimized and secure.
Contact us to discuss our global network design services. Also, ask us how we can leverage our portfolio of over 300 network service providers to minimize or eliminate consulting service expenses and to layer on a customer experience program to govern the selected service providers. We look forward to hearing from you.