Everyone’s Getting in on Flexible WAN/Cloud Connectivity

Brian Washburn

Summary Bullets:

• Many providers have placed their MPLS WAN service edge inside data centers, offering secure connectivity with class of service support.
•  The expanding list of competitive offers means enterprises do not have to look far for flexible WAN/cloud connectivity options; pricing should only get better.

When it comes to connecting the enterprise WAN edge directly into the data center, it seems many of the major global and U.S. network providers are now in on the action. Just in the past several weeks, Verizon upgraded its Cloud Services Interconnect to Secure Cloud Interconnect, adding granular visibility and management control to connectivity in major Equinix locations worldwide and select U.S. Terremark facilities. XO announced Bandwidth-on-Demand, a service that supports dynamic bandwidth across the company’s WAN PoPs, including those terminating in data centers. Similar types of services have been launched by AT&T (Cloud Network Enablement and NetBond), tw telecom (Intelligent Network), Level 3 (Cloud Connect), and Orange Business Services (its long-established VPN Galerie). While these offers’ approaches and features differ, they all offer the security of transporting traffic all the way into the data center via an enterprise WAN and honoring class of service (CoS) support. Most of these WAN-to-cloud services have usage-based billing, to handle moving big workloads. Many also support bursting with CoS performance up to double, triple, or many times more bandwidth.