Market Dynamics
Although all IT departments today recognize that application and communication delivery over the WAN is essential, most organizations struggle to deliver acceptable performance. Unfortunately, the complexity associated with application and communication delivery will continue to increase dramatically over the next few years. Three major market trends will increase this complexity: the emergence of the Private Cloud, the use of Public Cloud services, and the growth of Unified Communications&Collabotation (UCC) solutions.
Enterprises continue to face all the traditional challenges in WAN management ― mergers and acquisitions, decentralization of employees, and on-demand access to enterprise resources by customers, partners or suppliers. With the needs for greater flexibility and efficiency, most enterprise IT departments must build an IT environment based on the cloud services model: a Private Cloud. The IT team is required to provide IT resources that are accessible on-demand, agile, and easily customized to meet internal customers’ needs such as business units. Delivering IT-as-a-Service over any network is a challenge: whether business-critical applications are still hosted in traditional data centers or have been migrated to an internal or external cloud, they must be delivered to employees located in branch offices with the best performance. They increasingly require a business-oriented approach for WAN management, and better visibility and control over how network resources are used and shared between lines of business or enterprise entities.
The use of enterprise Public Cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, such as Webex, GoToMeeting, Salesforce, Google Apps and Microsoft Online Services, is on the rise and is another challenge for the IT team. Aside from security and regulatory compliance issues, maintaining acceptable service levels is the biggest concern that enterprises have when considering public cloud services. These interactive or real-time SaaS applications are accessed by employees through corporate Internet access links, whether centralized or not, and compete with bandwidth intensive traffic such as recreational Web surfing, emails and software updates. Consequentially, network congestion can severely degrade the performance of SaaS traffic, hindering all the benefits of public cloud services.
The growth of Unified Communications & Collaboration (UCC) traffic is the next major challenge for the network. UCC is unusual in that it generate different types of traffic: not only voice streams but also signaling flows, as well as video, instant messaging or even P2P file transfer. Another peculiarity is that audio and video are very sensitive to changes in performance. While a file transfer can easily be slowed down without disturbing users, this is not possible for communications. Given the importance of user experience in Unified Communications projects, controlling and measuring network performance is crucial.
Wthe the upcoming challenges or Private Cloud, Public Cloud and UCC growth, well managed application and communication delivery over the WAN is a prerequisite for business excellence. As network requirements continue to become more demanding, IT professionals will no longer accept “good enough” solutions from multiple vendors. To effectively manage the increasing complexity of the WAN and the pervasive growth of Cloud and UCC traffic, the market will embrace breakthrough integrated solutions.
