Organizations to Manage Network Traffic with Hybrid Networks

In an interaction with Faiz Askari of SMEStreet, Bala Mahadevan, CEO, Orange Business Services, India explained the latest trends in the enterprise networking domain.

The excerpts:

Faiz Askari: How are the Enterprise networks evolving in recent times in India?

BALA Mahadevan: The growth in network traffic in recent times has been phenomenal. Indian internet users are expected to grow by about 600 million between 2015 and 2020, driving a threefold increase in internet consumption to reach an equivalent of 12 billion DVDs per year. This growth is largely driven by the increasing ease in mobile access, wi-fi expansion, and demand for video services.

At the same time, enterprises are at the forefront of this growth as they begin to experience significant increases in traffic on their networks, along with a shift to the Internet as a destination. Business users are using the internet to collaborate and access computing resources, ranging from cloud applications to video communications.

Connectivity requirements are changing; consumers are becoming more and more demanding. How does all this effects on the technology providers?

As demand for connectivity increases with both consumers and business users, the need for network resilience is no longer limited to large sites and data centers, but equally important to all users no matter where they are located. Enterprises need to relook at how they approach the management of their networks and optimize network efficiencies. While the need of the hour is to reduce transport cost via internet offload,it also opens up enterprises to other issues such as performance management and security.

With regards to advance technology adoption, cost factor has also became a major roadblock in the SME domain. How can enterprises better leverage the internet and cloud, while still keeping bandwidth requirements and costs under control?

To optimize the network, enterprises need to approach it from a business needs perspective. The new enterprise network needs to combine the best of IP-VPN and Internet. This hybrid network needs to be able to dynamically prioritize and route traffic based on importance, location, device and user, and be capable of securely connecting to and interacting with multiple public cloud service providers.

Hybrid cloud is expected to see the highest adoption in Asia and will be a pillar for corporate IT for good reason.Combining the strengths of shared public and private cloud, hybrid cloudallows for setting up the required security levels (CSO’s priority), agility and scalability (business and CIO’s priority), cost efficiency (CFO’s priority) and flexibility (end user’s priority).This will enable users to access business-critical applications anywhere, anytime.

Please share your views on India’s digital emergence from the perspective networks?

The traditional enterprise network was primarily designed to provide access to consolidated applications in enterprise data centers, but the internet is taking up more and more capacity on the network. For example, our customers are seeing that 40% of traffic on their WAN is now destined for the internet, and that WAN traffic in total is growing 21% year on year.

Internet traffic is typically routed over the enterprise IP VPN infrastructure until it is broken out to the internet in regional gateways. This approach allows enterprises to enforce central control and security,unlike with locally-procured internet services. However, enterprises might see a tradeoff in terms of network, performance in the form of latency if the end user is too far away from the internet destination.

What is the best possible remedy that Enterpirses can adopt in order to offer better connectivity experience?

To overcome the above mentioned challenge, enterprises should look to increase the number of internet breakout points. This helps lessen overall traffic load on the VPN, reduces latency by breaking out closer to the destination and keeps the potential attack vectors to a minimum. Orange Business Services uses this approach with our Business VPN internet solution, which incorporates 15 separate gateways.

The internet can also play a part in reducing congestion on enterprise networks by offloading traffic from the IP-VPN. This could include traffic such as batch transfers and other high-bandwidth low-priority traffic. Application optimization is the key here, as it provides the granularity, visibility and control over all your applications. Branch offices in particular, which typically do not have high-bandwidth links, will benefit greatly from it.

Content delivery networks also support hybrid networks by prioritizing and securing internet traffic based on importance, location, device and user.

What are your suggestions on ensuring Digital Security?

Security is paramount to any new approach to the enterprise network. It has to ensure the application of a consistent security policy across locations, devices, and networks.

Furthermore, IT departments will need the power to dynamically adapt security settings to the individual, depending on his role and the business risk that the he poses to data. For example, a user would have different levels of security depending on their role in the organization, the data they want to access, and the security strength of the device and network they are using. No matter whether a user is accessing is accessing resources located in the cloud or in the enterprise data center, this granularity in security and access management needs to extend to the cloud in order to ensure the same level of protection for all users.

Ultimately, the hybrid network can help enterprises take advantage of the internet, while still keeping control of their network infrastructure, prioritizing business critical traffic and staying secure.