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Is your global infrastructure delivering the performance you need?

Kristaps Petrovskis

Expereo, Chief Technology Officer

It’s a fact that a robust global network infrastructure is crucial to enhance business efficiencies, communication, capacity, and the ability to expand. Still, with increased complexity and choices, many multinationals find it challenging to get the required performance to support re-invented business models. To support your transformation journey, you need to take a global approach to network procurement and management.

Demands and expectations from partners and customers are only growing, and multinationals must transform or be disrupted. Speed, agility, security, innovation, and customer value are paramount. The key to achieving this is to become more connected and integrated globally and across the business ecosystem.

Each multinational needs to take a unique approach based on their size, market share, workforce, number of sites and locations, industry, etc. Some have adopted software as a service (SaaS) to improve performance – others combine SaaS or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) as part of their cloud transformation.

At the same time, multinationals are migrating from MPLS to internet-based underlays because it is cost-effective and a better fit for cloud-centric networking and SaaS consumption. With business-critical traffic across public Internet connections, multinationals must re-think infrastructure design and revisit connectivity roadmaps to ensure business performance and continuity.

Many enterprises are looking at SD-WAN coupled with secure access service edge (SASE) to gain business-class connectivity at a fraction of the cost and deployment time of legacy networks like MPLS. These new technologies promise to give multinationals the agility to divest, acquire and grow.

A global network has many intricacies to consider, including:

Many C-level executives have limited knowledge of addressing this broad landscape. Countries vary in provisions and costs. For example, last-mile costs can be unexpectedly higher in one location than another.

Yes, SD-WAN and SASE can secure and connect the furthest branches and most challenging locations. SD-WAN, however, is only as good as its connectivity underlay, so it is vital to employ fit-for-purpose Internet connections to maximize performance. This requires an in-depth understanding of Internet peering in-country, regional and global contexts.

Multinationals must choose the right combination of networks and internet service providers (ISPs) to support business outcomes. It is not just the cost of deploying the technology that needs to be considered, it is also the ongoing upkeep, maintenance, and upgrades.

Some multinationals have failed to map out a clear vision for their SD-WAN deployments across branches and borders. Between upgrades and new purchases, they are hosting multiple SD-WAN platforms and vendors together with ISP sprawl. By purchasing individual elements ad-hoc, they have lost sight of strategy, visibility or predictability of services.

Enterprises are increasingly turning to experienced and vendor-agnostic managed service providers (MSPs) to match the best SD-WAN/SASE platforms to their requirements. The significant benefit of using an MSP is that they can design, implement, and run a bespoke network solution that supports all business communications and data needs.

A managed or co-managed approach in the run phase provides a single point of contact for multinationals looking to reduce and control management overheads. This is especially attractive given the critical nature of the global infrastructure to business and the ongoing skills drought. It ultimately allows multinationals to free up precious IT resources to focus on business-generating projects.

There are also added complexities around connectivity MSPs can assist with. Multinationals must procure Internet services in different parts of the world, for example, and have teams to troubleshoot any issues 24/7. Here at Expereo, we see performance and support difficulties arise when multinationals make these Internet service purchasing decisions locally without an overall strategic view.

Multinationals must not be drawn into thinking that the ISP is selling a simple commodity. Enterprises need their Internet services to offer good peering and the shortest path to exchange traffic between their locations and the cloud. This is vital to deliver the optimal latency and capacity they need to operate effectively.

Poor Internet peering and network congestion can lead to unstable connectivity, downtime, and unnecessary business risk. Unfortunately, multinationals often forget ISP due diligence in their purchase.

Multinationals also use SD-WAN to enhance the connections with their cloud providers, but the poor performance of the underlay network often hobbles this approach.

ISPs and cloud providers share routes via the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which looks at available paths for data to travel and picks what it thinks is the best. This typically means jumping across networks (autonomous systems) that are perceived as the shortest path. The issue is that BGP has existed for decades when the Internet was smaller and less complex. Today, its size means the perceived shortest path is not necessarily the fastest one.

Expereo has developed a way around this by utilizing Enhanced Internet that leverages software-defined networking for the underlay at key global locations. This provides optimized BGP routing to cloud destinations. These optimization capabilities deliver real-time traffic enhancements with gains, including eliminating any packet loss and reducing latency by 30-40%.

Designing and building a global network fit for purpose is difficult. Maintaining it is even more difficult, Expereo makes both easy.

Talk to our expert team about your performance and business needs and we will help you identify, design, build, and manage the right combination of solutions to solve them.