16
CONNECTIVITY
Unshackled
connection
By Nic Elliott, CTO, Evolving
Networks
www.evolving.net.uk
SD-WAN over bonded connectivity
can provide a greatly improved
Internet experience for all users
Businesses are more geographically disparate than ever
before. The trend for consolidation and economies of scale
has led to a number of mergers and acquisitions in the past
decade. However, multiple sites mean multiple issues for IT
managers – including connectivity.
The connectivity of the UK was recently brought into
focus by a new report that highlighted how we’re something
of a broadband laggard. With the average broadband
download speed being 16.5Mbps, the region is currently
ranked just 31 st in the world and is trailing behind most of
Europe, Thailand and New Zealand.
Get yourself connected
Unfortunately, connectivity is paramount to a modern
business, whether that’s between sites, connecting to the
Internet, or both. Resilience, speed and reliability are critical.
Now add in the increased cloud usage and keeping an
organisation connected is becoming a challenge everyone
is trying to solve. The issue isn’t going away; it’s in fact
predicted that by 2018 more than 60% of enterprise
infrastructure will be cloud-based.
The other paradigm shift is the amount of data ‘flying’
across the average corporate network. Current estimates
from IDC show that there’s now up to five zettabytes of
information on the planet, and it could be ten times that by
the end of the decade.
All of the above has meant that traditional wide area
networks (WAN) are struggling to meet current business
demands. The old-style enterprise WAN is something of a
behemoth – powerful and reliable, yes, but also, expensive,
inflexible and not scalable. New resources typically take
months to implement, forcing IT to predict usage patterns
and workloads way into the future, and to bet significant
budgetary and other resources on those predictions.
www.networkseuropemagazine.com