Key WAN Design Considerations for Cloud Connectivity & Business Continuity

It is hard to believe the Internet is over 25 years old.  During this time the world witnessed exponential growth in the Internet and with it Wide Area Networks (WANs).  Today business life would be unimaginable without WANs.  Commerce, emails, data transfer, information searched all depends on WANs.  Thus WANs are not only ubiquitous, they are vital.

All of us have experiences WAN outages (if you have not you are lucky!).  the moment this happens every employee is up in arms, productivity plunges, use of cuss words increase and in general the mood turns sour – and who gets blamed? – the network administration group.  The only other thing that is bound to get people even more upset is if the paycheck is not deposited on time!

Unfortunately, if a WAN is only connected by one data-line, and the line is cut or goes down, chaos results.  Even though the ISP has an SLA with you, it is only a promise that the network with be up a certain percent of the time. If not they pay a penalty while you incur the wrath of employees.  To avoid this, many network administrators introduce redundancy to WANs.  Redundancy can be achieved in many ways.  Multiple lines aggregated using BGP or FatPipe technology solves the problem.  BGP is arcane and requires a great deal of expertise while FatPipe technology is “set it and forget it”.  This paper will discuss discusses WAN redundancy and reliability and is a good starting point in ensuring you have a “high availability WAN”

Click HERE to download the white paper