Connectivity for Enterprises

Connectivity for Enterprises

In an increasingly globalized and fast-paced world, it is of great importance for enterprises to possess a safe, quick, and efficient network that allows them to keep up with it to perform at their best. A secure network will also lower operating costs. Just imagine 7-Eleven and all the connected branches: they need to verify there is smooth communication between the headquarters and the branches (as shown in the hub and spoke model), which may vary in different regions, cities, and countries.

Even though we have already had technologies connecting us, these traditional might have some limitations and affect the connectivity. Therefore, it is vital for an enterprise to utilize better technologies. In this article, we present and compare three alternatives that provide better networks for enterprises.

First, Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), a system that is a reliable, flexible, scalable, and efficient way of connecting real-time applications. Despite these benefits, MPLS is very expensive and takes a long time to deploy. In addition, since the service provider is in charge of constructing the network and setting up every single one of the devices, the enterprise will lose some control over MPLS and they will depend largely on the provider.

Second, SD-WAN, a virtual infrastructure. It is a better, cheaper, and more flexible alternative compared to MPLS. It also provides network independence, however, it is important to have people in the department who know how to manage this software. On the other hand, this software is not able to identify between the branches’ network (it gives the same default IP address to all of them), which makes the communication between devices disabled until an engineer solves this problem. Also, even though the deployment time is shorter than the MPLS, it still takes a long time and great effort.

Third, ecWAN, which is better than the previous ones.

In the first place, ecWAN is a software that is installed in the existing infrastructure that solves the issues that SD-WAN has. It “translates” the IP addresses, giving each router a unique virtual identity that distinguishes it from others, in other words, it unifies management in a clearer way. ecWAN creates an overlay network to bridge branches from office networks in other regions; with this technology, distance is not an obstacle and connectivity will be as if the branches were in the neighborhood. Secondly, the deployment time of this alternative is considerably shorter and simpler, and requires less work. Besides this, ecWAN transfers more data in less time and it sets priorities to different subnets to assure the best quality of service (QoS).