M+E Daily

Although a lot of discussions around online connectivity challenges have focused on the last mile, the Internet’s middle mile is significant also, according to PacketFabric and telecom market research company TeleGeography.

The middle mile, a term used to describe the network segment that is between local access and destination networks, was explored by the companies Sept. 22, during the webinar “The State of the Middle Mile, with TeleGeography.”

“In the category of motherhood and apple pie, I’m going to just start with saying that the world is going hybrid and multi-cloud,” Alex Henthorn-Iwane, CMO at PacketFabric, said, echoing what he noted during the recent PacketFabric webinar “Comprehensive Hybrid Cloud Connectivity with Direct Connect, VPN and NAT.”

Ninety-three percent of enterprises have a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy, he said, citing data from Flexera’s annual survey. Henthorn-Iwane again quoted Gartner analyst and vice president Don Scheibenreif, saying: “We’re not planning for one future. We need to plan for many possible futures.”

“Cloud adoption is really about being able to move at speed with agility in a lot of ways, and that’s why it’s getting adoption,” he said, noting “it’s not per se the cost saving – it’s the ability to move faster.”

“What’s happening is that there’s a shift away from that old hub-and-spoke reality of a data center and everything connecting into it as the center of the world, and all the network community being focused on the on-premises data centers, on-premises headquarters and branch offices, etc.,” he explained.

“What’s really happening is that the center of the business is moving into this hybrid and multi-cloud core of colocation data centers, more multi-tenant data centers, various cloud providers, enterprise” Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and “even, as you gain more sophistication, alternate cloud providers,” he said.

“There’s a collection of critical pieces where apps, services, data, etc. are now more distributed than ever, and how you connect all that together is really an issue,” he pointed out.

“How you access all of that kind of beating heart of the new digital business is really about technologies like secure access service edge and, to a large degree, SD-WAN in terms of connected branch offices and things like that,” he told viewers. “If it’s a consumer, it might be an Internet edge, a CDN, front-end managed DNS or mobile edge of some sort.”

However, he noted: “Those are ways to get to that core of application services that are being served up. And, speaking agility, there’s a number of different business needs that this new cloud core needs to serve. There’s steady state needs: all the average use that you have that, generally speaking, rises over time as business grows. And we all know that bandwidth demands grow over time, generally speaking.”

“There’s also seasonal needs,” as well as innovation and initiatives, as well as disruptions – “things that happen you don’t expect” – that play a significant role, he said.

“This is kind of the new reality for the enterprise IT architecture that is now centered in this new constellation of cloudy assets and providers and data centers and such,” he said, noting that it requires a “real adjustment in thinking about that and that’s why this topic of the middle mile is so important.”

Noting that PacketFabric and TeleGeography have had a relationship for a while, he turned the discussion over to Erik Kreifeldt, principal analyst at TeleGeography, who took a deep dive into the Internet middle mile.

The middle mile provider “proposition” includes some significant factors, according to TeleGeography.

First is “differentiation from the traditional menu of wide area network services that you get from a telco” and an Internet Protocol virtual private network (IP VPN) is “no longer the default option for an entire WAN,” according to Kreifeldt.

There is also an alignment with cloud services, he said, noting that could include: short-term transactions vs. multi-year terms; usage-based or flat rate pricing by region; agile provisioning via user-friendly portals; network performance monitoring and visibility; and accessible customer service and support.

As cloud adoption continues to rise, the center of enterprise IT gravity has moved to a cloud core consisting of hyperscale cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, colocation data centers and enterprise SaaS including Salesforce, according to PacketFabric and TeleGeography.

To ensure user experience and delivery of mission-critical application and data flows, how the cloud core is connected matters more than ever and “the middle mile is an emerging answer” to that challenge, according to the companies.