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MPLS & SD-WAN

Flexible working arrangements are revolutionising the way companies do business. Office-based models are diversifying as remote working becomes the new normal. Midland Telecom is helping its customers transition to these new ways of working as smoothly as possible by ensuring you can connect to more locations than ever before, simply and reliably, all through one supplier - Midland Telecom.

MPLS

Private

Dedicated

Resilient

Fully Managed

The days of businesses operating from one location are numbered. Even if you only have one physical office, it is highly likely that you are either consuming a range of services, such as SaaS or UCaaS from a variety of locations, or have additional sites for storage or manufacturing that need access to services back in your office.

With Midland Telecom you can connect to more locations than ever before, with just one network and one supplier – Midland Telecom.

Whether you are using an ADSL, FTTC, FTTP, Leased Line or a mixture of these connections across your sites; Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) technology brings them all together to provide secure traffic across your network.

Secure, Fast & Robust

Your internet connections are effectively converted into private connections with your internet access provided via a cloud-based internet breakout at the required speed providing built in resilience for all locations.

Your MPLS enables fast and reliable connectivity between multiple offices and services – irrespective of their geographic location with Secure, Fast and Robust VPN ensuring high-speed connectivity between your sites and out onto the internet.

Your internal data traffic never passes over the Public Internet and instead always remains within the MPLS network, reducing your exposure to hacking threats and denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Key benefits of an MPLS:

Quality-of-Service (QoS) features allowing traffic passing from site-to-site to be prioritised ensuring the most important or time-critical traffic has priority over less important services.
Delivers guaranteed levels of security and performance.
Variety of access circuit options and carriers.
Flexible bandwidth.
Multiple VPN support.

Future-proof

This type of solution is highly scalable; it can be easily adapted to meet changing business requirements. Additional sites can be added to the network whenever needed using a variety of access options.

Moreover, because the network can support voice and video communications, as well as other prioritised data, businesses that opt for this type of network can also introduce Voice over IP (VoIP) and Video Conferencing facilities at any point in the future, as the infrastructure will already be in place.

SD-WAN

What is SD-WAN?

A Software-defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) is a virtual WAN architecture that allows enterprises to leverage any combination of connectivity services - like an MPLS - to securely connect users to applications and centralised services.

An SD-WAN uses a de-centralised control function via a Network of Routers/Firewalls to securely and intelligently direct traffic across the WAN. By choosing the best route, SD-WAN increases application performance and delivers a high-quality user experience. It also builds in WAN resilience by utilising all available routes to the application based on congestion and availability. This results in increased business productivity, agility and availability, whilst reducing costs.

Traditional MPLS Cirsuits were never designed for the cloud. They typically require backhauling all traffic – including cloud-destined traffic – from branch offices to a hub or headquarters data centre where advanced security inspection services can be applied. The delay caused by backhaul impairs application performance resulting in a poor user experience and lost productivity.

Traditional VPN-based WANs created on old generation routers and firewalls could not make the routing decisions needed to deliver the increase in application performance that SD-WAN was designed to achieve.

Unlike the traditional router-centric WAN architecture, the SD-WAN model is designed to fully support applications hosted in on-premises data centres, public or private clouds and SaaS services such as Salesforce.com, Workday, Office 365 and Xero, while delivering the highest levels of performance for legacy datacentre-based applications.

SD-WAN uses a network of SD-WAN compatible firewalls that Midland Telecom supplies as part of its WAN offering and configures these to meet your required specification. In addition to the SD-WAN benefits, these next generation firewalls also offer enhanced deep packet inspection security and web content management together with complete visibility of both network and application traffic.

What are the benefits compared to MPLS?

Compared to MPLS, SD-WAN can be less expensive and provide higher performance. MPLS can have steep bandwidth costs.

The short answer is that SD-WAN offers better visibility of all network traffic, availability & resilience, enhanced performance, ease of scalability and more security. It is why the industry has seen interest in SD-WAN rising over the past few years.

So far, so good. But the challenge is that most SD-WAN solutions do not provide the same level of security as MPLS. With Midland Telecom’s use of next generation firewalls this issue is no longer valid.