Like many others, I’ve spent the last eight weeks working remote from the office (including a couple of weeks of real “welcome home, you’re in remote self-quarantine” isolation after flying home to NZ from the US) and during that time I’ve been working on the Nuage Networks from Nokia and Asavie technology partnership that we announced on April 15th.
The thesis for Nuage Networks from day one revolved around connecting all business users to their business applications and workloads regardless of where either resided – employees being in the branches and home offices and the applications being in a data center as either a physical host or as a virtual compute instance in a private or public cloud. Now, with the combined solution from Nuage and Asavie we are able to extend the SD-WAN service coverage to seamlessly connect with employees who are not at the branch (or home office), but are ‘on the move’ with their mobile broadband attached phones and tablets.
For the Enterprise this means a seamless connection on the mobile device, no cumbersome VPN clients to fire up for the time you need to access the corporate IT hosts in the private host, or additional software to drain battery cycles. It also means that those mobile users can be managed with the same business, security and network policies as if they were sitting at their desk in one of the businesses offices. So, James the marketeer has the same reachability into the applications he is granted access to regardless of location; yet all managed with full visibility and control of the single SD-WAN policy framework, without downloading and managing additional client VPN software.
For a Service Provider this will be the first time, for an Enterprise IP WAN service, that their wired and wireless network assets can be seamlessly connected to build a national IP WAN service with a single policy framework that covers both fixed branch and mobile devices (and IoT for that matter).
Think about that, a single WAN service that connects Enterprise branch locations to their private and publicly hosted IT systems, covering all employees both in office or on the move, and providing integrated service-chaining into any of the hosted solutions and services of the Service Providers Telco-Cloud environment simply and consistently to the customer’s WAN service.
This is the power of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) in action and shows that as this key networking technology advances, the network islands within the Enterprise which added complexity and cumbersome management to the WAN and hindered the speed of networking, are ready to be removed forever by SD-WAN.