3 Ways to Modernize WANs

Time to market is a non-negotiable when operating in today’s digital economy. Companies must be agile enough to quickly pivot in response to evolving market dynamics and flexible enough to scale up or down on demand. So, if you’re trying to upgrade or modernize your wide area networks (WANs) with standard approaches, you might run into challenges. Waiting six to twelve months to get new connections up and running introduces the risk of getting left behind by your competitors.

Businesses use WANs to connect users to applications, services and other resources across business locations, colocation facilities, cloud service providers and other centrally located resources. The dispersed endpoints may be distributed worldwide or in separate colocation data centers on the same campus. Further, companies are expanding the use of WANs to include multicloud and SaaS connectivity, which increases the urgency for modernization.

What’s driving WAN modernization?

In addition to expanding the uses of WANs, there are other factors driving businesses to modernize their WANs using virtual networking solutions, including:

• Boosting agility to pivot on demand: Rely on the flexibility of virtual networking to accelerate time to market
• Reducing the complexity of global networks: Simplify and extend the reach of global networks with virtual connectivity
• Lowering total cost of ownership (TCO): Shift to a flexible, predictable OPEX consumption model
• Improving user experience: Establish reliable, low latency connectivity between the cloud and the user
• Scaling bandwidth requirements: Enable the flexibility to scale up or down on demand

Companies are searching for solutions to modernize their WANs and discovering that using a mix of physical and virtual connectivity solutions can help solve their specific business challenges.

How Equinix Fabric interconnection speeds WAN modernization

Physical interconnections form the backbone of the internet and global communication networks, enabling seamless data exchange, collaboration and innovation at scale. But virtual interconnections are on the rise thanks to how quickly they can be deployed—in minutes—and how well they enable organizations to manage network resources dynamically based on real-time demands. They also offer built-in network redundancy and help customers build resilient networks worldwide.

With Equinix Fabric®, they can use ports for one to many connections and interconnect to themselves and any provider, partner or customer within a metro or globally on Platform Equinix®. There’s also the flexibility of connection types and bandwidths. For example, choose between an Ethernet Virtual Private Line (EVPL) for a point-to-point connection or Ethernet Virtual Private LAN (E-LAN) for a multipoint-to-multipoint network and then create up to 50 Gbps virtual connections for high-speed data exchange between endpoints.

Equinix Fabric virtual connections also help companies connect with other Equinix digital services platforms, such as Equinix Network Edge and Equinix Metal®. Organizations can deploy virtual firewalls, routers, and SD-WAN gateways, as well as virtualized compute instances, all without physical hardware. These digital services help organizations modernize their infrastructure to respond more quickly to changing business needs.

Finally, data center interconnection from Equinix Fabric enables companies to rethink how they design their WAN to connect the digital core, which includes their corporate network, regional back-end data infrastructure locations, with their multiple cloud and service providers, in a way that lets them move traffic faster and more reliably anywhere in the world.

3 drivers for modernizing WANs with Equinix Fabric

You might be wondering what businesses can accomplish with modernized WANs. Here are three examples of how customers use Equinix Fabric virtual interconnections for their WANs.

Improve application performance, enable bulk data transfers for disaster recovery (DR)

• A financial services customer needed WAN connectivity to transfer large volumes of data from its production site in one IBX data center to its DR site in another IBX. It used Equinix Fabric for primary and redundant cloud connections between IBX data centers and other service providers.
• This customer also needed to house critical banking applications in on-premises environments established in three Equinix IBX locations. It used EVP-LAN Data Center Interconnect over Equinix Fabric to connect the IBXs using 50 Gbps virtual connections and 100 Gbps ports.
• The customer now has a digital infrastructure platform that offers lower latency, is more cost efficient and has elastic bandwidth to cloud providers and other business partners.

Reduce latency to service provider interfaces, remove single points of failure

• A fraud detection and prevention solutions provider needed to simplify its global network connections and routing with end users, cloud service providers and partners.
• This customer collaborated with Equinix Solution Architects to design and assemble a solution that included EVP-LAN Data Center Interconnect and our colocation services.
• The customer was able to establish low-latency connections to desired cloud regions, gain ecosystem access to preferred service providers, improve the end-user experience, reduce route complexity and realize cost savings.

Connect NSP networks with regional carriers to optimally route inter-carrier traffic

• A global supply chain partner in food and agriculture needed a way to connect carrier networks with reliable regional connectivity services.
• It used Equinix Fabric to deploy an EVP-LAN Data Center Interconnect network as a global backbone between its regional networks.
• The customer now has a single network with low latency and on-demand interconnection worldwide, allowing it to take advantage of the dual carrier and dual redundancy of Equinix Fabric for easier network management and lower spend.

We know each company has specific requirements for modernizing WANs. Learn how your company can use virtual interconnection to modernize your WANs by reading The Future of Interconnection white paper.

Check out the Equinix Fabric data sheet for details on how to dynamically and securely connect with thousands of customers, partners and top-tier networking, storage, compute and application service providers worldwide.