Summary
SaaS-based applications are now crucial to business. Cloud-managed core network services enhance access to these applications from remote sites and offices, improving overall effectiveness and efficiency.
Situation & Solution
Salesforce, Workday, Office365, Slack, Google Apps and Concur are just a few of the SaaS-based applications powering modern organizations. There are several compelling reasons SaaS applications are widely embraced. One critical reason is accessibility. SaaS-based applications are rooted in the cloud and by design they are accessed via the Internet. Internet access overcomes the constraints of datacenter architectures and traditional networks. This makes it easy to reap the benefits of SaaS-based applications, right?
Not so fast, my friend.
Accessing critical applications via the Internet is double-edge sword. While Internet access is commonplace, relying on SaaS-based applications requires more – reliable and high-performance Internet access. Is this a problem? Probably not when the end-user resides in the headquarters or other large facility. But what about users who reside in remote, branch and regional facilities?
In many cases remote networks are linked to the corporate datacenter, so SaaS application traffic is routed from a remote office to the datacenter network. From the datacenter it is then forwarded to the SaaS Point of Presence which may be nowhere near the end-user. This multi-stop architecture may degrade the performance, reliability and simplicity of using SaaS applications.
The emergence of SD-WAN technology has been a godsend for remote access to SaaS-based applications. SD-WAN most often backhauls traffic over the Internet. This means that users in remote sites can be directly connected to SaaS applications as well as to their datacenter. Eliminating hops closes the gap between users and SaaS applications.
So, if SD-WAN makes SaaS access from a remote facility better, what makes it optimal? The answer is to locate core network services on-premises in each remote facility while managing them centrally through the cloud. On-premises network services ensure performance and survivability. Cloud-management allows unified and consistent control using centralized resources.
Enterprise-class DNS and DHCP plus single pane of glass visibility maximizes performance and efficiency. This is true optimization.
