* Cloud services and rapidly improving connectivity across the country spurs new thinking around WAN network design
* Centralised policy management is combined with decentralised policy enforcement at branch level
* Now, branches can break out to the Internet directly, yielding a number of benefits
In today's cloud-driven technology era, where mobile and fixed-line connectivity across South Africa continues to improve in leaps and bounds, it's time to look at a new approach to networking architecture, says Louis Kirstein, portfolio manager for connectivity and networks at T-Systems South Africa.
Traditional configurations often rely heavily on dedicated and expensive MPLS networks to connect an organisation's branches with its head office. Traffic is sent up and down, between a branch and the head office, where there is a single 'break-out' to the public Internet, which serves all branches.
For many organisations, this is how their branch sites connect to external web services.
Historically, there has been no alternative to this. In many regions, branches have struggled with direct Internet access that's industrial enough (and at a reasonable price point) to serve business' needs. Added to that, there's been no easy way to secure and policy-manage the break-out at the branch.
But, driven by a cloud-first enterprise technology strategy, many organisations are turning to network designs whereby each branch accesses, or 'breaks-out', to the Internet directly.
This involves clearly separating what will be centralised (such as fair use policy or data leak policies, driven by the organisation's corporate governance function), versus what will be decentralised - which is the distributed enforcement of those governance policies at each branch site.
1. Risk mitigation - From the perspective of head office, branch sites now lie 'on the outside', needing to traverse the firewall to access internal services. This ring-fences the risk of any individual branch being compromised, to just their local area. The rest of the corporate network will remain unscathed in the event of a breach or compromise, and services throughout all other regions will continue uninterrupted.
2. Network efficiency - Instead of a single MPLS network being flooded by traffic, and data being continually parsed between branch and head office, each site now efficiently uses the bandwidth that it needs to access external services. This makes a lot more sense, especially considering how much corporate software is available through public web front-ends (such as Office 365 or Azure).
3. Facilitation of one's public cloud strategy - As many organisations realise that the majority of their data, applications, services and infrastructure can be most cost-effectively served from public cloud environments, having a decentralised WAN infrastructure aligns perfectly with the drive to adopt public cloud wherever possible.
4. Easy integration of cloud-based security tools - Cyber-threats evolve at a rapid pace, meaning organisations need regular updates from hosted security tools to remain protected from threats. Decentralised WANs support the quick roll-out of patches to each site, as each site independently connects to the hosted security solutions.
5. Ease of embracing hybrid WAN architecture - Hybrid WANs bring together fixed-line connections like fibre and DSL, as well as wireless services like 3G, LTE and satellites. Decentralised network architectures and hybrid WAN configurations often go hand-in-hand - combining to give each branch the best possible connectivity and the freedom to access a host of new online and cloud services.
6. Cost reduction - With each branch now self-sufficient in terms of Internet connectivity, MPLS infrastructure can be dramatically scaled back and often removed entirely. This removes a huge cost burden from the organisation and frees up capital for revenue-driving technology investments.
Most importantly, critical networking and security updates can still be 'pushed' in a mandatory fashion, to all branches, so there is no overall loss of control for group IT and its security function. The access to these security updates simply comes from the direct connection between the branch and the Internet.
By combining this type of network design with advanced approaches to security information and event management, such as using first-class Security Operations Centres, organisations take on a very strong network security posture.
So, whether an organisation has six branches, 60, or even 600, taking a decentralised approach to the WAN can yield significant business benefits.
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