Choosing a Better Path Forward
- Team arroWebs
- • May 23, 2024
Still using MPLS? Break free from legacy limitations to achieve higher performance and cost savings.
That Was Then
In its heyday over a decade ago, there were ample reasons to choose MPLS. At the time, it was seen as an innovation offering reliable bandwidth and a closed, private network for multisite companies. Back then, MPLS served as the logical choice for handling network connectivity between branch locations and corporate headquarters. With minimal internet traffic and most application data going to a corporate data center, the routing structure offered by MPLS was the right tool for the job, albeit with a hefty price tag. So, for many enterprise organizations in those days, the choice seemed obvious: MPLS was an investment that made good business sense.
This Is Now
Nowadays, the terminology may vary – “digital transformation” or “the cloud era” or “digitized network” – but the facts on the ground remain the same: networking and connectivity are critical to the daily and ongoing success of a business. Unlike 20 years ago, business connectivity is no longer something that gets utilized sometimes, for limited uses. It is now used all the time and across nearly every aspect of a company’s business. Digital transformation has already arrived, and it is here to stay. Legacy architecture that was a good idea many years ago is no longer up to the task. Today’s WAN solutions are agile and more reliable, delivering end-to-end availability, uptime guarantees, higher performance, and managed services for optimized, 24/7/365 monitored security across locations, devices, and users. Why, then, are some organizations still using rigid, expensive MPLS?
Aversion To Change
For some, it may be the perceived risks associated with change. Technology deployments – especially a network overhaul – can be an especially stressful time for IT departments. Network interruptions can cause delays that ripple across the workday. But, when faced with the very real performance and resource costs of maintaining an expensive, outdated network architecture, a company’s aversion to change should start to diminish. For most organizations, the benefits of choosing a modernized WAN solution are far greater than the hesitations around making the decision to upgrade.
Today’s WAN: Agile, Secure, Reliable
In addition to being agile, faster, and more affordable, today’s WAN solutions also offer a variety of managed service features, including monitoring, security, and support. Plus, most industry-leading solutions offer SLAs with performance, availability, and uptime guarantees, which ensure a robust and reliable network to meet day-to-day application demands. The many benefits of a modernized network include:
- Lower Cost. For most organizations, to get the bandwidth and performance required for their applications would make MPLS costs go sky high. With sourcing, installation, billing, and support, today’s managed WAN solutions offer significant convenience and cost savings compared to the ongoing expense and resource burden of maintaining legacy infrastructure.
- Higher Performance. Software-defined networking options deliver better performance, speed, and agility, as well as better reliability with failover and redundancy. Today’s solutions also support businesses’ customer-centric cloud strategies, ensuring innovation, growth, and alignment with business goals.
- Better Use of Resources. Maintaining the health of an outdated infrastructure saps the time and focus of in-house IT. By choosing to modernize the network, companies can empower their IT team to focus on tasks and plans that align with business strategies. Additionally, by selecting a managed WAN option to further reduce costs and free up resources, companies allow their in-house IT to pivot toward long-term technology strategies that help grow the business.
A Better WAN For Better Business
Smart business decisions made over a decade ago are now way past their expiration date, and organizations are not getting nearly enough value for the level of investment required to maintain MPLS. Outdated, legacy infrastructure now poses significant cost and performance risks that are far higher than any real or imagined risk of change. With extensive software-defined options (including SD-WAN, Managed SD-WAN, SASE, SASE-as-a-Service, and more), today’s network solutions deliver boosted performance, security, and customer experience that enable business growth. With so many reliable choices available, the right path forward for most organizations is to adapt, upgrading to newer technologies that can achieve far greater results.