The Challenges of Switching from MPLS to Broadband

Let's start by simply stating that MPLS is arguably still the leading way to interconnect remote offices back to the company’s primary data centers. MPLS is also great for real-time traffic (like video conferencing). Yet even with those facts working in MPLS’s favor, its usage is dropping year after year. According to TeleGeography’s annual WAN Manager Survey, there was a 24% drop from 2019 to 2020 – and that trend hasn’t slowed down.

It’s not that there is a reduced need for remote connectivity – it’s quite the opposite. With the increasingly distributed model that organizations are adopting, MPLS is no longer the only – or even the best – solution to meet the needs of many enterprise customers. These evolving needs are being driven by multiple factors, including:

• The adoption of cloud services (so not all traffic is going back to the organization’s data centers).
• The rise in remote workers with broadband connections to their home offices.
• The widespread availability of broadband options in all regions across the globe.

Is broadband simply replacing MPLS?

While broadband does provide a high-speed Internet connection from a provider to a specific site (which might be enough for some very small organizations or an organization that is running entirely on a mix of cloud services), it is not going to meet the needs of most enterprises.

Additional technologies like VPNs will work for many remote workers. They can be used to grant individual end-user computing devices secure access to the corporate network so that remote workers can use the internally-hosted applications that are critical to handle day-to-day operations.

For site-to-site traffic, many organizations are moving to Software Defined Wide Area Network-based solutions. SD-WAN has been described as the next generation of evolution beyond MPLS. It removes the need to have private circuits and specialized physical devices to interconnect and route traffic between sites since it will run over any broadband technology. SD-WAN solutions can even consolidate multiple broadband connections to provide redundancy and optimize which links to use based on the policies it is given (just like MPLS can do).

Challenges to consider when moving to broadband

VPN clients and SD-WAN devices over broadband are easier to get up and running than MPLS environments, as they are transport layer agnostic, their policies are centrally managed, and they’re cheaper to acquire and maintain. The challenges that need to be addressed include replicating the benefits of MPLS as a truly private network. The Internet is the most public network that exists. It is full of bad actors looking to find and exploit security weaknesses. The second big challenge of routing traffic on the Internet is the inability to guarantee performance. You can negotiate SLAs with all the broadband providers you work with, but that only covers traffic to the edge of their network.

Both of these scenarios can be addressed and the concerns can be mitigated, but it requires some planning and investment beyond the traditional network monitoring solutions that your organization uses to monitor MPLS.

For security, investing in VPN clients for all remote devices and SASE-enabled SD-WAN solutions provides encryption and firewall functionality to ensure that only authorized users can get access and that any data flowing over the Internet is secured. In addition, application performance monitoring (specifically, synthetic and real-user monitoring) will become crucial for providing data to the team that manages the network (so that they know what your actual users are experiencing at any given time). This can enable network teams to be proactive and update policies to change how traffic is flowing to keep everyone working. In contrast, MPLS is not good at dynamically adjusting policies.

Conclusion

For most use cases, migrating away from MPLS to SD-WAN and VPN technologies running over broadband is the wave of the future. Having a network built on commodity broadband provides so much more flexibility to enterprise customers – which they need in order to be competitive in today’s constantly changing technological and political landscape. For example, it’s much more efficient and cost-effective to use broadband when you have data flowing directly from an ever-increasing number of locations to the multiple cloud service providers in use today (like SalesForce and ServiceNow) rather than having to route everything back through the primary data center (as MPLS would be set up to do). This trend is also bringing new sites online and completely changing the type of broadband being used (for example, some people are moving to satellite) without the need to re-engineer anything.