The waning of the WAN? Not so fast

摘要

Many of my clients are getting serious about the Internet. Let me explain: No, they're not Rip Van Winkles who've slept through the technology innovations of the past 20 years. But they are thinking about how they can use Internet sen-ices to augment - or even replace - their WANs. They have a lot of reasons. Some companies feel they're too small to deploy a full-fledged WAN. Others find the rates for Internet bandwidth are superior to those they can negotiate for traditional WAN services (such as frame relay and MPLS).A common problem is geographic footprint, especially for access: Although a carrier serves a particular region, it doesn't provide local connectivity to the specific city or building needed. In addition, there is a handful who simply wonder: Why not? Internet reliability has increased steadily over the past several years. Consumer adoption of such applications as VoIP and video streaming would seem to indicate the Internet is fully capable of handling such applications. Moreover, application-layer security can do a fine job protecting sensitive data - making a private network moot. So, many folks are beginning to wonder seriously why they should bother with aWAN at all, Here's why eliminating the WAN entirely is a dangerous strategy First, despite happy consumers touting VoIP services from such firms as Vonage and Skype, quality in enterprise deployments has varied wildly.Yes, I've spoken with folks who use.say, Skype to communicate with their outposts in Eastern Europe - and who swear it works just fine. For every one of them, however, there are at least five others who say its quality is so iffy it's simply not enterprise ready