IP traffic is set to triple - is your business ready?

Keeping up with exponentially increasing bandwidth demands

Organisations around the world are struggling to keep up with the growing demand for bandwidth – and the size of the challenge will only increase as emergent technologies like artificial intelligence, the Internet of things and big data analysis mature.

The scale of this growth is mind-blowing.

Cisco’s Visual Networking Index predicts that global business IP traffic will grow more than three-fold from 2017 to 2022, growing at a rate of 25 percent annually to reach up to 58 exabytes per month. When you consider that, according to the Whatsabyte website, 15 exabytes is the equivalent to all the data currently held by Google, the challenge becomes clear.

But what does that mean for business?

Today’s business infrastructure operates with an extraordinarily high baseline. End-users expect global, real-time access to applications. Customers expect reliable availability and water-tight security. And the business expects core compliance, cost efficiency and the ability to innovate.

Ultimately, businesses require a network that can evolve to meet a variety of demands – and excel at each of them. Networks must be faster, more agile, and simpler to manage. That means connectivity alone is no longer enough.

The rise of the software-defined network

The emergence of software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) is offering IT departments the opportunity to meet these challenges.

SD-WAN provides organisations with greater network visibility and control, improves connection resilience, removes bandwidth-intensive traffic and improves connectivity and integration.

IT departments are recognising the potential of SD-WAN, with significant uptake expected in the next three years. IDC’s Worldwide SD-WAN Forecast has predicted that demand for SD-WAN will increase by 40 per cent. Gartner underlines that trend, noting that more than 90 per cent of WAN edge infrastructure refreshes will be on SD-WAN or vCPE platforms by 2023, up from just 40 per cent this year.

SD-WAN technology is one of the fastest industry transformations, and organisations are modernising their wide area networks to improve cloud-enabled applications, according to Rohit Mehra, vice president, Network Infrastructure at IDC.

While SD-WAN uptake is on the rise, businesses looking to optimise their network need to think beyond the latter. To achieve ultimate network agility, organisations should start consider a combination of secured network, Internet and SD-WAN capabilities.

SD-WAN Connect: Combining secured network, Internet and SD-WAN capabilities

As business cloud adoption continues to sky-rocket, your business will need to adjust to changing operating conditions.

Telstra’s SD-WAN Connect supports SD-WAN management by facilitating the most direct route for applications, maintaining secured network performance through traffic (IPVPN and Internet).

For businesses that have Internet carriage, IPVPN and an SD-WAN box or virtual function on-site, Telstra’s SD-WAN Connect service intelligently routes traffic based on current and required performance across Internet and IPVPN to optimise costs and improve business agility.

What does SD-WAN Connect enable your business to do?

New technologies are transforming how businesses deal with a range of challenges.

For example, imagine a mid-sized retail company with 20 locations across Asia that is growing faster than its current IPVPN connection can manage. Without increasing its IT budget, Telstra’s Business Technology Services (BTS) unit was on hand to scope the design and build of a simple network that reduced risks and optimises connectivity usage.

By using SD-WAN Connect, the retailer can now intelligently route traffic across dual transports, prioritising business critical apps to improve performance, and maximising IT budgets.

But what about a bigger organisation? Another example where SD-WAN Connect can make difference would be to a large-scale enterprise – think of a global company with more than 200 physical locations in every major city. In this situation, the company was experiencing increasing demands on bandwidth applications and was looking for a solution to streamline IT operations while improving security and network performance.

The solution is clear. By selecting a SD-WAN overlay with internet connectivity the company was able to improve bandwidth, performance monitoring and reporting, and enhance security. It also benefited from 24/7 support with the ability to scale faster, and the assurance of a full network backed by redundancy.

SD-WAN Connect provides improved bandwidth and performance to support business transformation journeys, in a new era of data intensive applications.