Connectivity

Legacy physical analog and digital trunks are rapidly being replaced by logical, SIP-Based trunking services.  These offer greater failover, differentiated services, and additional security through the use of Session Border Controllers.  Ideally suited for cloud deployments, centralizing trunks across large enterprises allows greater utilization and improved price and performance metrics.

Network traffic used to be heavily east/west focused as distributed employees connected to corporate data centers.  However, with most applications now deployed in the cloud, traffic patterns have shifted to north/south to and from the Internet.  This makes broadband and fault tolerant access to the Internet mission critical in today's communication networks.

MPLS Networks have been the Wide-Area Networks of choice as they are ideally suited to carry voice, video and data traffic with an emphasis on Class of Service (COS) and Quality of Service (QOS).  However, these networks are extremely complex, expensive, difficult to manage and costly to support.  Many customers are now seeking Software Defined WAN's or a combination of MPLS and SD-WAN as a more cost effective backup than multi-carrier, dual MPLS solutions.

Software Defined Wide-Area Networks are exploding onto the communications landscape.  Technology companies like VMWare and Cisco have made huge investments in this technology.  They offer MPLS-like differentiated services, but can be delivered over the Internet or networks that combine MPLS and Internet technologies together for the most agile and cost-effective transport available.

Lets face it, some business locations do not have access to wired high speed connectivity over copper or fiber.  Wireless provides a great alternative to these challenges and can support speed that in some cases exceeds that of traditional wired networks.  This makes today's appetite for broadband access more available and cost effective than traditional alternatives.

Virtual Private Networks utilize the Internet to establish temporary or permanent, secured tunnels that carry network traffic between multiple physical locations or to and from remote workers and partners.  These remain very important to most business customers and typically come in either IP-Sec or SSL variants.  This technology also allows for cost effective disaster readiness or business continuity solutions to be deployed for emergency situations.