Hybrid WAN FEATURED ARTICLE

Cincinnati Bell (News - Alert) Business and CBTS are leveraging SD-WAN technology from VeloCloud to support an array of services, the companies recently revealed.

“This managed VeloCloud SD-WAN product supports our portfolio of hosted collaboration applications, cloud computing, and other services that will further enable CBB and CBTS customers to have best-of-breed technologies and support the increasing technology demands of their customers,”  Christi Cornette, senior vice president of marketing for Cincinnati Bell, commented.

The carrier said it selected the VeloCloud solution after testing it using various connectivity scenarios. Those tests involved both single broadband and single LTE links, and dual MPLS connections.

AT&T (News - Alert) and DT are among the other service providers that have tapped VeloCloud for SD-WAN solutions.

Whether sold by traditional carriers or SD-WAN specialists, SD-WAN has grown in popularity for a variety of reasons. It can enable organizations to more affordably and efficiently bring connectivity to their branch offices, and to better manage that connectivity.

It’s more affordable because businesses as a result can opt to drop their pricey MPLS connections (a point most carriers are trying to downplay). But even if businesses elect to keep their MPLS connections, SD-WAN enables those organizations to make better use of what they have, because it lets them employ their secondary and other links all the time rather than having them sit idle until the primary link goes down. SD-WAN is also appealing because it allows for more network automation, meaning better response times, more centralized management, and the need for fewer IT resources.

But SD-WAN is not just about the network. This technology also can address application performance by leveraging pre-programmed policies to ensure that traffic gets the treatment it requires for the best user experience.

The adoption of cloud services is widely noted as a driving force that has led SD-WAN to take hold at this particular point in time. Ensuring WAN performance becomes more important in a cloud-centric world, notes Rohit Mehra, vice president of network infrastructure at research and consulting company IDC (News - Alert).

"As public and private cloud use continues to grow, WAN performance becomes critical to latency-sensitive and mission-critical workloads and inter-datacenter business continuity," says Mehra. "Accordingly, as enterprises plan and implement comprehensive cloud strategies, WAN architectures need to be considered alongside, and in conjunction with, data center infrastructure. Moreover, as enterprises move business processes to the cloud, there is a greater need to fully integrate cloud-sourced services into WAN environments to ensure workload/application performance, availability, and security."