As more enterprises become increasingly global, there is a requirement for enterprises to rapidly spin up new business locations. However business WAN and communications services often become an operational bottleneck. More enterprises are attracted to the lower cost and rapid service delivery of Internet-based service compared to the traditional WAN service which can take from 60-120 days to deliver and incur higher recurring connection cost. However Internet-based service often requires ISP management, and management of multiple ISPs is a complex and expensive task. Leveraging a service provider to manage multiple ISPs is an important consideration for enterprises.

Another issue is the prohibitive cost of managing CPE across geographically disparate locations. Monitoring and maintaining complex network hardware requires costly personnel and support structures. This inhibits flexibility and contributes to long lead time for the deployment of new applications which is another key pain point for the enterprise.

The chart below (Figure 5) illustrates some of the key challenges facing enterprises in the process of deploying new network applications.

Cloud adoption and mobility also create new pain points. Security risks and network reliability highlight some of the top concerns that enterprise CIOs consider for their WAN services from a global perspective (see Figure 6).

Cloud services shift the destination for many applications and, as a result, change the topology of the WAN as well. This presents the necessity for new security approaches, while also bringing up the importance of network scalability, availability, more bandwidth and also application performance to sustain end-user experience. Key concerns include the provision of cost effective network redundancy and business continuity solutions.