The team at Trustgrid often laments the lack of innovation in WAN technologies. Many are quick to point to SD-WAN as an example of innovation, and they’re right. SD-WAN is pretty cool but it’s target market is very limited. SD-WAN is designed and priced to displace MPLS. And why shouldn’t it? MPLS is famously expensive and requires intense engagement with some of the least effective tech companies on the planet – telecoms. SD-WAN has found a home unhooking MPLS completely or dramatically reducing the bandwidth allocated on those circuits.
Trustgrid targets a different market – the millions of point to point connections between enterprises. Branch office connectivity, MPLS’ and SD-WAN’s home base, is not our concern or interest. Trustgrid is a solution that enables businesses to connect between clouds, datacenters, and edge networks (on-premise). Could SD-WAN do this? Perhaps. But this use case encounters many challenges not experienced within organizations:
- Security expectations are much higher than internal connections
- Change management takes on entirely new dimensions between IT organizations
- Deployment requires coordination between IT teams (and sometimes without IT at all on one end)
- Cost becomes more important due to shared cost structures
- Compliance issues affect multiple organizations and can result in a lot of finger pointing