Aligning Your Network Evolution with Business Reality
If you look at the marketing coming out of the networking industry right now, you’d think “Digital Transformation” is something you can buy off a shelf. The narrative suggests that if you aren’t ripping out every piece of legacy infrastructure to install the latest SD-WAN or SASE appliances immediately, you’re falling behind.
But the reality of enterprise networking is rarely a “rip-and-replace” scenario. It’s a journey.
SD-WAN is effectively the standard for modern networking. The benefits—agility, application visibility, cost efficiency—are undeniable. It is the destination where most enterprises should, and will, end up. However, the timing of that journey shouldn’t be dictated by a hardware refresh cycle or a vendor’s sales quota. It must be dictated by your business reality.
The “Why” Before the “How”
Too often, I see IT leaders pressured into transformation discussions based on technical debt: “Our router support contract is expiring, so we need to move to SD-WAN.”
While that’s a valid logistical trigger, it’s not a strategic one. True network transformation happens when we stop looking at the network as a utility and start looking at it as an enabler. The conversation needs to shift from “How do we replace this box?” to “What is the business trying to do that the current network can’t support?”
If your business is aggressive about cloud migration, that’s a trigger. If you are acquiring a company with a messy, disparate infrastructure, that’s a trigger. If your workforce is now permanently 40% remote, that’s a trigger. The technology is the answer, but the business requirement must be the question.
Embracing the Hybrid Reality
There is a misconception that you are either “legacy” (MPLS) or “modern” (SD-WAN/Internet). This binary thinking is dangerous.
For many large enterprises, the most effective operational state for the next few years will be hybrid. You might have mission-critical, latency-sensitive legacy applications that run perfectly on your existing private network. Keep them there. Simultaneously, you might have new branch locations or remote users accessing SaaS applications like Salesforce or Microsoft 365. Those workloads are perfect candidates for direct internet access via SD-WAN.
There is no shame in the “messy middle.” A hybrid approach allows you to validate the new technology and prove ROI on specific workloads without introducing the risk of a total network overhaul on Day One. It allows you to sweat your existing assets while pivoting your budget toward the future.
Recognizing the Real Triggers
So, if we aren’t transforming just because a vendor told us to, when do we move? Here are the three indicators that it’s time to accelerate your shift to the Edge:
- Cloud Density: When your traffic to SaaS and public cloud providers outweighs the traffic going back to your private data center, the “trombone” effect of backhauling traffic through a central hub no longer makes sense. You need to break out locally.
- Workforce Dispersion: When “the office” is no longer a single physical location, your security perimeter can no longer be a firewall at headquarters. This is the transition point from standard SD-WAN to SASE (Secure Access Service Edge), where security moves to the cloud to follow the user.
- Visibility Blind Spots: When your helpdesk tickets are filling up with “the internet is slow” complaints but you have no data to see why, you need the application-layer intelligence that modern Edge solutions provide.
The Bottom Line
A good network partner shouldn’t just try to sell you the “new thing.” They should be interested in managing the health of your current state while preparing you for the future state.
The goal isn’t to have the newest technology for the sake of it. The goal is a network that disappears—one that works so seamlessly and intelligently that your IT team stops thinking about connectivity and starts thinking about innovation.
(This post is inspired as a followup to a webinar discussion I participated in on the state of the Edge and enterprise network evolutions).