By IDG Research

Customer dissatisfaction is the most worrying potential impact of poor application performance. And the top response to poor app performance is to throw costly legacy bandwidth at the problem. Those are the findings of a recent IDG Research Services TechPulse survey of IT decision makers. Read the whitepaper.

Ratcheting up your current bandwidth solution to solve application performance issues is at best a short-term fix. Worse, it obscures a lack of visibility into network and application performance and serves as a gatekeeper rather than an enabler. As a result, efforts to adopt more cloud, embark on digital transformation, and unlock new business opportunities will be difficult to achieve.

Larger enterprises over the past decade or so have largely migrated to Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) to set up private Wide Area Network circuits using public carrier networks. MPLS works well for linking major hubs, such as data centers, but is costly and time-consuming to provision, upgrade, and repurpose.

As Forbes contributor Jason Bloomberg recently observed, MPLS “is more expensive than now-standard Internet broadband connections.” It’s increasingly questionable whether the security of MPLS is worth the premium pricing, particularly if it’s too rigid to meet rapidly changing requirements.

That’s why software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) technology is rapidly emerging as a preferred alternative. Among other benefits, SD-WAN  provides cost-effective delivery of business applications and intelligent path selection across WAN links for more cost-effective delivery of business applications, according to IDC.

Future success requires breaking loose of traditional network hardware constraints and considering the powerful combination of SD-WAN and high-speed broadband.

To learn more, view this white paper: SD-WAN: Satisfying Application Performance Needs.