The IT infrastructure landscape is in the middle of a massive change. The proliferation of point security and networking appliances continues to drive up IT cost structures. Cloud adoption and the shift to a mobile workforce has made connectivity between entities other than physical offices ever more critical…
The IT infrastructure landscape is in the middle of a massive change. The proliferation of point security and networking appliances continues to drive up IT cost structures. Cloud adoption and the shift to a mobile workforce has made connectivity between entities other than physical offices ever more critical. Buying more point-solution or continuing to running networks separately only adds more complexity and cost.
Instead we’re starting to see the convergence of IT. By moving towards a simpler infrastructure with fewer point solutions, we reduce the costs and complexity plaguing our current IT environments. This trend is playing out across four IT tiers: networks, appliances, services, and management.
Network convergence
Many companies currently connect office users with MPLS services or Internet VPNs, and mobile users through VPNs over Wi-Fi and 4G/LTE networks. Cloud resources have required extending these networks further to cloud infrastructure providers (Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure) and cloud access service brokers (CASBs). This makes for an extremely complex environment. Network convergence collapses all of these networks into one reliable, cost-effective resource for all users and endpoints.
Software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs) are a first step towards network convergence. They consolidate our provisioning, configuration and application control around the ways we normally connect our offices, Internet access and MPLS services.
But SD-WANs don’t go far enough. Converging MPLS and internet using edge nodes requires the continued use of costly MPLS links to run latency-sensitive apps. SD-WANs also become far more complicated to deploy when connecting into the cloud, if it’s possible at all. Customers need to determine location of data repositories, map subnets for configuration purposes, and negotiate cloud access. And no SD-WAN incorporates mobile users, forcing companies to maintain separate infrastructure for users to “VPN” into the corporate network.
Comprehensive network convergence would consolidate all enterprise networks, including mobility and cloud, into one cost-effective and efficient network. It would be global, connecting all users and resources, regardless of their physical or virtual location.
Appliance convergence
Appliance convergence consolidates the stacks of security appliances currently protecting the network — including next generation firewalls (NGFW), secure web gateways (SWGs) and more — into a single instance.
For years, we’ve tried to reduce our branch office footprint with “servers in a box.
