SD-WAN and Office 365 - A marriage made in heaven (or the Cloud)
So your company finally moved to Office 365 with happy images of a mobile workforce that will be optimizing applications wherever they are. But reality has set in and unforeseen performance issues cause employee productivity to slow to a crawl. How can this be? Doesn’t the Cloud, and Office 365 in particular, promise us all a brave new world of endless possibilities? The answer is, sort of. But if your company is accessing Office 365 using the same old internet service of yore, then your shiny new Office 365 roll out may suffer from latency and network congestion leading to poor performance and the dreaded bad end-user experience.
This has become a known issue, acknowledged even by Microsoft “Best Practices for using Office 365 on a slow network”, but before you copy and paste this link and send it to every employee, let’s look at the problem and discuss a solution. First, we need to remember the Cloud offers us amazing benefits, smoother collaboration, automatic back-ups, and on-going updates and patches, but your enterprise traffic is now going to have to compete against consumer traffic, e-commerce, streaming videos, social media, and my download of Prince’s greatest hits. Frankly it is a congested nightmare out there and your simple Cloud application is stuck in the middle of it.
Moving to the Cloud is not just subscribing to Cloud services. Guaranteeing fast access to these off-premise applications is equally important. The fact is, most companies are working with legacy network solutions that were implemented long before moving to the Cloud was even thought of. So, often times, these legacy solutions fail to deliver acceptable application performance and productivity suffers.
In the case of Office 365 the issues are multiplied. Office 365 requires increased bandwidth for synchronization with Outlook, software updates, template downloads, and a heck of a lot more. This can add up to a 500% increase in required bandwidth for Office 365. But’s it’s not Office 365 that is at fault, it is the nature of the internet itself. There are three main reasons why legacy technologies slow down your Office 365 performance:
Congestion and latency on public internet kill performance.
The public internet is the easiest and most popular way to connect branch offices to Cloud applications. Because of this, there has been an explosion of enterprise traffic over the public internet. This has led to increased congestion and packet loss, which leads to poor application performance. Many organizations try to address this issue by increasing bandwidth but that is not where the issue lies. The issue is not with the last mile it is with the middle mile. So increasing bandwidth at the location can be like hitting the gas on the on ramp to a congested freeway. It really isn’t going help much.
MPLS Solutions were not built for the Cloud
First off it is important to remember that MPLS was not designed with Cloud applications in mind. In turn, it does not address the unique needs that the Cloud bring to the table. Some carriers are trying to address this fact when it comes to Office 365, but as of today only a handful of carriers have partnered with Microsoft and if you are lucky enough to be working with one of them, their services will come at a premium. In addition, MPLS limits your choices for last mile deployment and can take anywhere from three to six months install, it makes you wonder if MPLS is the best solution for your new agile Cloud environment.
Legacy networks do not have built-in WAN Optimization
Enterprises do what they can to conserve bandwidth expenses on their MPLS Network. To accomplish this, many MPLS reliant business have invested in expensive WAN optimization appliances on site. However, this is also not an approach that will work for the Cloud. A symmetrical, appliance-based, WAN optimization requires hardware to be deployed on both ends and no Cloud service provider is going to support the installation of customer appliances at their data center. Furthermore, deploying, maintaining and managing these devices at branches is a cost prohibitive task simply based on man hours alone.
So how does SD-WAN address these issues?
SD-WAN providers can offer a private business-grade Cloud overlay network and some have strategic POPs that will put your Office 365 traffic within 1-5 milliseconds from an Office 365 data center. Think of this as hitting the gas pedal to get onto an empty freeway and having your data traffic travel congestion free to the front door step of where you wanted to go. In addition, an SD-WAN provider will have a fully-meshed private global network, freeing your company from the hassles of maintaining and managing appliances, while providing optimized access to Cloud-hosted instances.
A final thought on this subject:
I have been in the IT and Telecom business for the last twenty years, so this is not the first time I have had this conversation. It often happens that new technology comes along and organizations try and take advantage it with-out fully understanding how it will work with their legacy network, hardware, etc. Your current network was probably not designed with the Office 365 or any Cloud applications in mind. So, if your business is serious about taking advantage of all the Cloud has to offer, it is time to sit down and discuss a SD-WAN deployment, some companies in this space even offer a free proof of concept so you have nothing to lose.
