Hybrid networks: The optimum approach

A growing number of organizations are moving to hybrid networks as a means of meeting their business and technical needs. Hybrid networks let companies connect a variety of locations from large offices and data centers to branch offices and remote workers. And the ability to select the service and performance levels needed by various business activities and enterprise applications make for an agile enterprise.

Your network is the central nervous system of your business. Traditional networking solutions are rigid, hard to manage, and lack visibility and control. Pure "over the top" solutions that make exclusive use of the internet certainly make life easier, but the performance required for business critical applications can’t be guaranteed. Getting it right "most of the time" isn’t an option. The market for hybrid network services is growing rapidly, which is being driven by and large by the increase in enterprise bandwidth consumption -- growing by 30 percent a year, according to Gartner’s market research. This is due to the increase in the number of devices connecting to corporate networks, the types of business critical applications and the increasing use of video communications.

Benefits realized, hybrid on the upswing

Every organization has a very specific set of needs, so being able to customize networking solutions across multiple deployment platforms means a network is optimized for each customer’s particular architecture and performance requirements. One size doesn’t fit all for dynamic organizations.

Hybrid architectures make it easy to design, deploy, manage and modify your global network to meet headquarters and data center requirements. They also reduce the complexity of making geographic changes when offices are moved or businesses are acquired and integrated into your operations.

A few of the other key benefits of hybrid networking services includes improved reliability, with multiple network service types being integrated into one logical, managed service. You also get increased reliability from a network service provider from the dynamic and agile features of hybrid services, but most important is the improved application performance achieved by using bandwidth on demand, load balancing and quality of service (QoS) options.

It’s this flexibility that’s essential to achieving optimum performance.

How to build your hybrid network

Your aim in building a hybrid network is to develop a solution that meets all of your business demands across multiple sites in the most cost effective and efficient way as possible, whilst maintaining a network that delivers high availability. Business Continuity / Disaster Recover (BCDR) requirements, public cloud connectivity needs, and the essential network functions required also need to be factored in to the design of a hybrid network.

In order to do this you really need to consider mixing and matching high performance services such as Masergy’s Intelligent Connectivity private network services coupled with VPN services such as our Network as a Service solution. Your provider should be able to mix and match these services to provide a robust BCDR as needed. Once you have such a platform that covers high performance and over-the-top services, you should then be looking at 'spinning up' MPLS, VPLS, VPWS, and public internet virtual networks as needed. Here, your provider shouldn’t limit you -- you should be able to spin up as many as required.

What’s next is an added level of flexibility. Key network functions like routing, firewall protection and enterprise session border controllers should be provided as a mix and match between on-premise, cloud based, and virtualized or software-based models.

Hybrid is happening now

Increasingly companies are upgrading their rigid and aging networks in favor of hybrid networks, for good reason -- hybrid networks can provide a single platform with unlimited flexibility.

CEOs are busy expanding their businesses through M&A activity, new employee hires and the development of new lines of businesses -- a PwC Consultancy survey showed recently that nearly half of the 1,400 CEOs interviewed said they expect to increase their organization's total headcount over the next 12 months. Extra staff put more pressure on networks, requiring further bandwidth, more robust security means, new applications types and added number and variety of devices.

But, there’s another reason why modern hybrid networks are so urgently needed: the rise of new bandwidth-hungry applications and services such as videoconferencing, mobile apps, big data and analytics are all having a massive impact on networks.

The bottom line here is that as more sophisticated technologies continue to make their way into an organization, the more traditional legacy networking infrastructures are going to struggle and eventually fail.

IT professionals should be spending time being strategic to their business, finding better ways to leverage technology to make their business more effective and to develop better ways for their clients and partners to do business with their organizations. Working with a managed network service provider enables IT professionals to do just that.

Photo Credit: phloxii/Shutterstock

John Dumbleton has served as Senior Vice President, Business Development since May 2008. He is responsible for strategic business development activities and oversees the marketing and demand generation efforts at Masergy. Prior to joining Masergy, Mr. Dumbleton served in senior executive roles at McLeodUSA and Allegiance Telecom.  His experience ranges from strategic sales, channel development, and product development to business strategy and strategic acquisitions.  Mr. Dumbleton holds an MBA and bachelor's of science in industrial engineering and operations research from Virginia Tech.