The past several years have seen organizations accelerate their cloud journeys, moving more data, applications and workloads off-premises. Reducing operational costs and improving performance were two reasons why. Teams can reduce capital spend on premises-based infrastructure and pay for only the compute and storage capabilities they use. Cloud also enables organizations to become more agile—data and applications can be easily accessed via the cloud anywhere they’re needed.

These factors are radically changing organizations’ business and networking models. As a result, WAN, network and data center models are feeling the strain. To date, extending traditional MPLS WAN connectivity to branch locations has been expensive and complicated. Organizations have relied on private leased lines, where an MPLS Ethernet solution delivering 100Mbps capacity can easily cost $1,000 per site, per month. Not only is bandwidth insufficient for today’s needs, but overheads can quickly add up, on top of the time it takes to secure circuits and deploy networking equipment.