Application/Bandwidth Requirements

Enterprise IT managers must continually manage costs and maintain reliable WAN infrastructures to meet their business goals. But, success in today’s business climate also depends on the ability to overcome a more complex set of challenges to their corporate WAN. Enterprise IT managers are faced with the following:

Geographically dispersed sites and teams that must share information across the network and have secure access to networked corporate resources.

• Mission-critical, distributed applications that must be deployed and managed on a network-wide basis. Furthermore, IT managers are faced with a combination of centralized hosted applications and distributed applications, which complicates the management task.
• Security requirements for networked resources and information that must be reliably available but protected from unauthorized access.
• Business-to-business communication needs, for users within the company and extending to partners and customers. QoS features that ensure end-to-end application performance.
• Support for the convergence of previously disparate data, voice, and video networks resulting in cost savings for the enterprise.
• Security and privacy equivalent to Frame Relay and ATM.
• Easier deployment of productivity-enhancing applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), e-learning, and streaming video. (These productivity-enhancing applications are IP-based, and Layer 2 VPNs do not provide the basis to support these applications.)
• Pay-as-you-go scalability as companies expand, merge, or consolidate.
• Flexibility to support thousands of sites.