When asked “what is your favorite candy bar?” my response was simple: a peanut butter cup. Somehow, the combination of chocolate and peanut butter in the right proportion perfectly hits the mark.

The ubiquitous Reese’s peanut butter cup in its bright orange wrapper always catches my eye at the supermarket checkout. While I usually resist, sometimes I just can’t, and the two cups in the package provide just the medicine I need. But, when the holidays come around, See’s Candies releases its own version of the peanut butter cup using much better dark chocolate and a very good peanut butter center.

However the very best peanut butter cup I’ve ever tasted is my sister’s – and actually, it’s a chocolate peanut butter bar. Why is her confection the best? It’s not just because it’s from my sister. It’s because she selects and uses only the highest quality ingredients. Not chocolate chips from a bag, but Valrhona or Guittard or Ghirardelli or another boutique brand. And she doesn’t use supermarket peanut butter from a jar, but rather, freshly ground peanut butter from the local health food store.

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As part of their digital transformation strategy, many enterprises are actively migrating applications to public cloud infrastructure and Software-as-a-Service offerings. Enterprise IT objectives and expected benefits of cloud migration include:

• Increased agility
• Higher application performance and availability
• Improved application accessibility for users
• Reduced data center footprint
• Lower costs

Unfortunately, the transformational promise of the cloud often falls short of meeting these expectations. Why? Because traffic patterns have changed. They have changed not only due to the migration of apps to the cloud, but also in response to today’s “work-from-anywhere” world.

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Even as we navigate the ongoing challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, SD-WAN adoption continues to accelerate at a breakneck pace. In fact, with fewer (or no) employees in branch sites for the time-being, some enterprises are accelerating deployments. Why? Many now recognize that WAN transformation is essential to realize maximum value from their existing and future cloud investments. 

However, with 60-plus vendors marketing and messaging around SD-WAN, it’s extremely difficult to sift through the noise and select the right vendor and the best SD-WAN platform for your organization.

While there are lots of criteria to evaluate, in this blog I’ll describe the top seven considerations to keep in mind when evaluating and selecting your SD-WAN vendor and platform. 

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WAN edge infrastructure is one of the most rapidly changing areas of IT, driven largely by the unabated migration of business applications to SaaS offerings and to public clouds or IaaS instances. As reported recently by Forbes, 83 percent of enterprise workloads will be hosted in the cloud by 2020^[1]. No longer centrally hosted solely in corporate data centers, applications are now hosted anywhere, and often in multiple locations. 

SaaS and IaaS providers strategically host their services in multiple data centers around the globe in metropolitan cities where business users are located. Connecting users to the closest SaaS and IaaS instances minimizes data transmission latency or delay and delivers the highest cloud application performance to end users. 

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Silver Peak continues to count down the Top Ten Reasons to Think Outside the Router in our homage to the iconic David Letterman Top Ten List from his former Late Show. Click for the #4,  #5, #6, #7, #8, #9 and #10 reasons to replace conventional branch routers with a business-driven SD-WAN platform.

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Continuing our homage to the iconic David Letterman Top Ten List from his former Late Show, Silver Peak is counting down the Top Ten Reasons to Think Outside the Router. Click for the #5, #6, #7, #8, #9 and #10 reasons to replace conventional branch routers with a business-driven SD-WAN platform.

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In our homage to the iconic David Letterman Top Ten List from his former Late Show, Silver Peak continues to count down the Top Ten Reasons to Think Outside the Router. Click for the #7, #8, #9 and #10 reasons to replace traditional branch routers with a business-driven SD-WAN platform.

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How often have you been on a VoIP call only to experience dropouts or garbled sound? Or endured a video conference with pixelated images or even a frozen screen? The expanding use of Unified Communications (UC) applications has placed increased pressure on IT to deliver an exceptional user experience to employees. But when user experience deteriorates enough, it results in a flood of calls to the IT help desk. Delivering consistent, high quality real-time communications is difficult, if not impossible, with a traditional router-centric wide area network architecture.

Why? Because conventional routers can’t overcome inevitable packet loss that negatively impacts quality voice and video communication quality and the user’s experience and productivity. WAN architectures based on traditional routers typically backhaul all traffic to a headquarters-based data center, adding latency or delay that contribute to poor quality.

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