CORE COMMUNICATIONS Wrangling WAN Costs After two years of keeping up,WAN managers take audit By Martin Vilaboy For most of the past two years corporate wide area networks have been put through the wringer. Hybrid and remote work and the acceleration of digital transformations pushed applications to the cloud and performance to the edge at rates no one could have predicted. Vulnerabilities to bad actors suddenly altered and expanded. All things considered, those corporate WANs seems to have held up pretty well. Rather than showing any signs of collapses, findings from Aryaka’s latest Global State of the WAN report suggest issues pertinent to hybrid working and edge accessibility and performance have remained steady or improved since the world changed in early 2020. But that has come at significant costs, and after what seems to be the brunt of the COVID storm, businesses might be ready to take closer looks at where they can regain some control of those costs and reallocate budgets to address more immediate priorities. “A renewed interest in ROI was reflected in this year’s report,” said Aryaka researchers. In the two prior State of the WAN reports, when IT and network decision makers were asked to consider the biggest challenges their organizations faced with their WANs, the top answers included the difficulties of managing new levels of complexity, slow performance 36 CHANNELV ISION | JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2022
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTg4Njc=