Roadblocks to Efficiency
The rapid transition to cloud computing that we are seeing today is unprecedented. The move has been rapid and it has had a powerful impact on our entire modern society. Digital resources and data are available at the touch of a screen. The cloud allows for scalability that was unthinkable just a few years ago and enables for product evolution at a rate that can keep pace with users and marketplace demands.
As a result, many businesses have quickly moved away from their traditional networking hardware and in exchange for cloud networks. Rather than upgrading a data center, they’re building platforms in the cloud that are faster, cheaper, and essentially maintenance-free.
However, for this transition to truly be effective, your new cloud resources need to be available equally to everyone. And the last roadblock to efficiency is probably sitting in your office right now. Many small branch offices are still stuck with a traditional WAN router and MPLS setup that forces all traffic through a central nexus point at the network core.
Like the hub and spokes of a wheel, this model chokes off the performance of critical applications and reduces access to resources. It can also overwhelm data centers with increasing volumes of cloud traffic. As long as your company relies on this type of centralized model, it will prevent you from fully transitioning to the cloud.
WAN routers introduce critical roadblocks that prevent your branch users from fully embracing all that the cloud has to offer. For example, critical business applications run on layer 7, which means that traffic shaping, connection steering, and connectivity management all need to happen at that layer. But a WAN router operates at layers 3 and 4, with any layer 7 functionality operating as an afterthought. This slows down functionality and provides suboptimal connectivity, even if the traffic wasn’t being routed back to the core network through a static MPLS connection.
Updated networking solutions from Axigent Technologies can simplify your transition to the cloud and make sure that your employees are able to enjoy the full range of benefits that cloud connectivity has to offer – without having to choose between performance and protection.