Why should you move away from MPLS to the Internet?
With a passion for global data networks, we both respect and understand Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) for what it is and what it’s done for our clients’ businesses down the years. MPLS came in as a way to impose circuit-switched discipline on rebellious hordes of packetized data, and in the nineties and noughties, this was enough. Global carriers understood its principles; network managers appreciated the simplicity of fewer hops and handoffs. But it's time to move from MPLS to Internet.
Technology evolves. It delivers solutions the market demands, and those solutions succeed or fail based on customer need at the time. And times, of course, change.
Today, Managed Service Providers are solving the CIO’s most pressing question: how to maintain MPLS-level reliability and assurance, without its unsustainable legacy costs? How can you switch from MPLS to the Internet?
Let’s deep-dive what it means to move from MPLS to Internet-based solutions and how CIOs can manage the risks of leaving it behind.
The modern challenges of using MPLS
Migrating from one technology to another always has speedbumps. Doubly true when old and new span different paradigms.
Among the MPLS managers we talk to, those hurdles come in four types. Let’s leap them one by one.
1. Carrier costs that don’t go away
We’ve explained before that MPLS isn’t a singular solution. In fact, relatively few organizations with MPLS use it as their sole strategy.
Fully a fifth of healthcare organizations use business broadband for at least part of their WAN. And with many MNCs now embracing the cloud, funneling all enterprise data over MPLS to the data center is inefficient. Cloud revenues are growing 17% a year thanks to Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others.
For many of these hybrid MPLS setups, Multiprotocol Label Switching on a Tier-1 pipe and an array of other providers in the last mile (and meter) works perfectly well as a stopgap. But of course, the complexity of MPLS is still in there.
And that matters because MPLS is often inflexible. Business Internet at a similar level of security and availability is typically easier to set up and faster to roll out.
Bottom line: if MPLS still forms part of your solution, it’s worth looking for ways to ease it out or risk losing your competitiveness.
2. Lessons in locking down security
MPLS has a deserved reputation for being secure. With a close relationship between the customer’s network and the carrier owning the physical infrastructure, privacy and security are natural bedfellows.
What’s missing from this picture is the progress made in SD-WAN technologies since MPLS first emerged. Early VPNs simply encrypted data at both ends as it bounced around the Internet; today’s SD-WAN creates a completely virtualized network overlay, riding on the public network but separate to it. A network that’s fully private, with whatever level of encryption, authentication, and other safeguards your applications need. And it’s more flexible than MPLS, since it’s accessible by plain-vanilla business broadband. Which means you can connect your most out-of-the-way offices.
Today the advantage of moving from MPLS to Internet seems clear, with high flexibility and strong security options. Business Internet is starting to make more and more sense.
But two problems remain: the potential waste of relying on one form of connectivity across the whole organization, and the natural turbulence (blockages and stoppages) of the public Internet if the whole network relies on business Internet. Let’s look at those next.
3. Maintaining connectivity across contexts
The first of these is something “big canvas” technologies like MPLS (and ATM, and SONET, and Frame Relay) purported to solve, but couldn’t: the complexity businesses face on the ground. Local infrastructure, service availability, legal and regulatory environments.
Local conditions don’t just differ widely from country to country—they can change from street to street!
MPLS makes a good fist of security. It’s also high-capacity and fast. But it’s never made much claim for flexibility. And if your locations span from an HQ in London, a rural business park in the Louisiana swamp, and a prefab in a Brazilian mining town, that’s a problem.
The best solutions to these local factors tend to be local. People who work in and understand the same conditions as their customers, who can react quickly to problems as they arise. When you stir in that local expertise, perhaps from a global Managed Service Provider with boots on the ground in many locations, you get the best of both worlds.
4. Sheltering from bad weather
Lags, drops, and timeouts used to be part and parcel of Internet access. But the Internet has changed. Today, even in consumer Internet access, they’re no longer a big issue.
Trouble is, that creates risks for a broadband Internet solution for business connectivity. Because it’s still subject to the tides and tornadoes of the public Internet, with billions of people on it.
One solution is Enhanced Internet. Optimizing the corporate WAN by actively routing and rerouting data pathways in real time, dodging traffic jams so your users are never inconvenienced. This lets MSPs, like Expereo, offer business connectivity over Internet with SLAs no different to Tier-1 MPLS carriers. In fact, they often provide services to those same carriers—meaning even “pure” MPLS is often a mix.
That’s an advantage today’s MSPs can offer. The flexibility of an Internet underlay, backed up by acceleration for applications in the cloud.
So for now, MPLS remains the dominant transport for WANs. But things are changing. More and more MPLS customers are sidestepping the hybrid model, and moving straight from cost-heavy MPLS to cost-effective business Internet for every SD-WAN.
The way forward is clear: From MPLS to SD-WAN and Enhanced Internet
With high-bandwidth, uncontended connectivity provided by an intelligent Internet underlay from an experienced MSP, organizations at enterprise scale can enjoy the same benefits—reliability, assurance, uptime—that private networks have always delivered.
With global presence and years of expertise, there are other advantages to partnering with Expereo, too. To see the business case for your organization, contact us.