Traditionally businesses take on huge investments in their WAN and at many times the cost of upgrading to keep up with the network demands or moving to a new provider is painful and typically becomes a long drown out project that ties up business time, money and resources. This is where IWAN helps; this solution is transparent to the underlying network that is runs on. Thus, making the corporate network an overlay to the underlying ISP’s network(s). At the same time simplifying the overall WAN architecture and providing a flexible, consistent management domain that allows businesses to be provider agnostic and bring branch offices online in days rather than weeks.
Today private backbone networks in general are high-cost networks that get sold due to them providing a consistent end-to-end reliable network. They also fall short in many aspects that are critical to businesses. Businesses are almost always constrained with provider’s time and WAN provisioning, effectively making the business move slower. Now with improvements in the reliability, performance, and relative cost of Internet connections lead many organizations to leverage the Internet to address these challenges by connecting branches directly to the Internet, to supplement the WAN; and by using the Internet as the WAN. This is an example of how IWAN(Intelligent WAN) has great potential to solve many business issues and creating a more flexible architecture to meet business needs.
Cisco's IWAN strategy is a new concept that many businesses are looking at to make the business more flexible and agile. IWAN helps business improve efficiency in all aspects of the business. From simplifying the network, streamline operations, deployment and management of their WAN while at the same time provide huge savings by right sizing the branch office WAN to provide intelligent active/active connectivity to the Internet and corporate network. Today’s workforce and their associated applications depend more and more on the network with each application carrying key network metrics and thresholds that define the QoE (quality of experience) to users. This is where the IWAN is able to dynamically steer applications across links when performance fallout out of threshold. This is one of many key components that make up the IWAN strategy. Below I outline some more benefits that encompass the overall IWAN strategy that business can leverage to overcome limitations in their current architecture.
Intelligent WAN Deployments: Balancing Cost with SLA
Here is a great article giving more information on how Cisco’s IWAN strategy could be your future WAN backbone. http://www.provenmethod.com/iwan-cisco-betting-internet-will-future-wan-backbone/
Key Business Outcomes that IWAN can bring: