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critical, high-bandwidth applications, Coppens continued.
“Data over the Internet is still secured by using IPSec
tunnels; and the customer is free to use their existing
ISP if they so wish.”
The Colt offering is delivered as a virtualized service
with built-in on-demand elasticity and multi-tenancy,
combining SD-WAN software with open, scalable
general-purpose server hardware at the customer’s
premises. With a broad set of networking and security
virtual network functions, Colt claims both agility and
economic advantage in the delivery of network function
virtualization (NFV)-based services for the WAN and
branch office by accelerating time-to-service while re-
ducing total cost of ownership due to centralized man-
agement for all sites.
The service expansion will be based on platform
elements provided by Versa Networks. Kumar Mehta,
CEO and co-founder said, “Versa has worked with Colt
for the last 18 months to create new NFV-based WAN
services. We are excited to continue our joint innova-
tion as Colt launches its cutting edge, software-based,
managed SD-WAN service across Europe.”
For customer sites that are “on-net” (i.e., directly
connected with Colt fiber) bandwidth scales in a very
cost-efficient way (off-net this is not the case). The in-
troduction of SD-WAN removes these limitations by en-
abling a path to public Internet for those apps which are
not latency critical such as email or web surfing.
Customers can then reserve off-net data capacity for
more business-critical applications. The end result is
that a hybrid network is formed where non-critical data
is offloaded to a secured Internet tunnel, freeing up
MPLS bandwidth for business-critical data, efficiently
increasing the total bandwidth to branch sites. Data
over the Internet is secured by using IPSec tunnels;
and the customer is free to use their existing Internet
service provider.
Colt is leveraging the intelligent SD-WAN platform to
enable its customers to dynamically route data traffic to
manage both secure and Internet routing in real time.
This can be configured by Colt or the customer.
Coppens added, “The SD-WAN is a new way to
architect, deploy and operate the WAN, providing a
dramatically simplified way of deploying and manag-
ing multi-site connectivity. So much so that it’s forecast
that by the end of 2019, 30 percent of enterprises will
use SD-WAN products across sites, up from less than 1
percent today.”
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THE CHANNEL MANAGER’S
PLAYBOOK