IS Unveils Enterprise Networking Platform CloudWAN

Pan-African telecoms service provider Internet Solutions has launched CloudWAN – its first virtual wide area network (WAN) solution for next-generation enterprise networking.

CloudWAN was developed by NTT Innovation Institute Inc. (NTT i³),  a Silicon Valley innovation centre for the NTT Group, which owns Internet Solutions' parent company, Dimension Data.

Using software-defined networking (SDN) technology and network function virtualisation, CloudWAN links public and private clouds into a virtual network that is smart, responsive, and endlessly elastic, said Saki Missaikos, managing director of Internet Solutions.

With the launch of CloudWAN, Missaikos noted that Internet Solutions will still be supporting organisations that use the traditional multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) platform.

"This is just a shift; MPLS will not be switched off," he said. "We are building highways and roads that everybody can use."

He added that CIOs are being challenged by cloud computing, changing customer expectations, big data analytics, IOT and mobility.

"These elements boost efficiency and performance but the wrong network can dramatically reduce their benefits. So it's time to rethink enterprise networking."

By delivering cloud-based, centralised network provision and management, Internet Solutions says CloudWAN overcomes the biggest drawbacks of legacy network technologies.

"Enterprises usually invest in private network services based on MPLS, which has been an industry standard for decades," says Greg Montjoie, executive head: SDN/Internet at Internet Solutions. "But data traffic and network complexity between business sites is more and more substantial.

"As multitudes of devices in numerous sites are added to an enterprise WAN, existing network technologies are increasingly restrictive, prohibitively expensive, and can no longer guarantee quick and reliable network connections."