Enterprise edge is telecom operators' new frontier

Due to the convergence of IT and telecom, network teams at communications service providers have been introduced to a succession of enterprise networking concepts and products. But talking about SD-WAN, virtual security and secure access service edge one after another misses the point.

All of these are laudable products. SD-WAN is multifaceted but generally misunderstood; virtual security -- the often-used and vague term that really just means virtual firewall -- makes total sense in an edge-delivered, dynamic environment, and secure access service edge (SASE) is the shiny object term du jour, but it has real merit and clearly is an idea at the right place at the right time. What do these technologies have in common? The list could be long, but they have four overarching characteristics:

1. Each is a virtual technology, self-configuring and self-managing.
2. Each focuses on the edge -- which is expanding rapidly with the meteoric rise of public cloud and remote work.
3. Once some edge infrastructure exists, each can be delivered on demand.
4. For security, all of them can and must be coordinated, consistent and service chained.

Appledore Research's SD-WAN research has argued as far back as 2019 that network operators have a huge opportunity to establish a new and dynamic enterprise edge on which to build a new business of on-demand, chained and managed services for enterprises. In particular, the report said:

• Single communications service providers (CSPs) can find significant synergies to deliver this bundle of bandwidth, and application-aware traffic steering and security.
• Demand exists for simplification and attractive commercial models.
• Huge operational efficiencies are inherent in the automation, but automation is complex and lends itself to a managed service.

Grant Lenahan

In general, major CSPs agree. Even their portfolio names suggested a similar vision. Rather than "SD-WAN," Verizon refers to its family of "virtualized network services," while Frankfurt-based ngena, a global end-to-end orchestrated SD-WAN-as-a-service company, describes its platform as a way to deliver services from an exponentially increasing set of partners and suppliers. Lumen, based in Monroe, La., refers to its ability to orchestrate bandwidth, SD-WAN, cloud as a service and third-party APIs as its secret weapon.

Over the past 18 months, CSPs worldwide have slowly been turning their aspirations into reality. It is a slow process that demands an automated mindset and significantly reorganized systems. If we are critical, most CSPs' product groups began with major gaps (covered in detail in reports and in-depth profiles on many CSPs' offerings). Yet to give credit where credit is due, many have steadily added capabilities from basic ones (cross-layer dependency analysis) to more advanced (API environments to support third-party capabilities within an orchestrated service chain).