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Today’s digital market and competitive edge is shaped by how and when a business provides its IT services and solutions to its customers. Customers want access to applications, systems, and services on-demand, without interruption, and timely. These goals remain paramount as innovation, quality, and availability continue to rank high amongst priorities in what businesses need to remain current in an ever-changing market. To do this successfully, performance and reliability of digital services are key to maintaining consistent connections and providing assurance that they will continue despite business changes.
Businesses continue to find different ways to deliver services that are transparent and seamless to its customers. For years, MPLS has provided access to computing services by connecting wide area networking across multiple sites and locations that require reliable communications and transmissions. It is a proven method of ensuring that networking continues regardless of how many users, applications, or systems access the same network.
The introduction of cloud computing has created a wave of software-based networking and topologies that are flexible, secure, and cost efficient. MPLS, by design, was not created to scale to the cloud; however, because data centers and legacy, high powered and performance driven computing continues across industries, it still is a major player in networking and future design solutions. And, as a continued solution in the realm of connecting WAN architectures and providing reliable transmission, MPLS can be used with cloud computing solutions and virtual networking.
Layer 3 Multiprotocol Label Switching or MPLS is a transmission method used for telecommunication services that provide routing of network traffic based on labels rather than network addresses. Traffic is labelled and prioritized to ensure the best and shortest transmission path based on business needs. With MPLS traffic uses both Layer 2 and 3 of the OSI model, allowing it to function like a virtual private network (VPN). It is configured to direct data so that higher bandwidth systems and applications are accessible and available when customer demand is high.
For over 20 years, MPLS has been providing network computing that has been proven to run efficiently and smoothly, under increased bandwidth needs, all while providing architectures that combine high demand applications and technologies and lower demand applications that are necessary, but do not require as much bandwidth as its counterparts. Although savvy in its ability to label, provision, and provide the availability desired for networking components, it was not created with cloud computing in mind; therefore, cloud computing architectures have been built around the capabilities that MPLS provide.
As digitalization has advanced to include cloud first business strategies that are lower in cost and in some instances easier to implement, MPLS appeal has declined. Small and mid-size businesses that neither have physical data centers nor centralized locations for computing may not be looking to implement MPLS, simply because their business needs may require a smaller scale solution. On the contrary, data centers continue to be hugely important to large businesses, such as telecommunications, governments, manufacturers, and financial industries where MPLS technologies can be incorporated into cloud architectures and can support existing WANs and business growth.
MPLS provides reliable transmission and has been around for countless years, have served enterprises of different sizes, and provides high quality connections. For businesses, the user experience is consistent and typically uninterrupted by frozen applications or dropped sessions. Because it routes and transmits data to help move it along its most appropriate path, it provides accuracy and timely communications that travel along the Internet simply does not have.
Quality of Service (QoS) is used to manage network bandwidth in MPLS architectures. It includes the technical aspects of handling uptime, jitter, and latency on the network. How traffic is labelled and classified directly relates to how QoS requirements are used to manage traffic. With QoS, rules are set for traffic routing, and each correspond to labelling and switching of the traffic as it reaches each router. Administration of these rules can be manually adjusted for each MPLS configuration and will change depending on the business and its WAN.
VPNs that are created based on MPLS can connect into cloud computing services provided by vendors such as AWS, Azure, and Google, since the implementations are complementary. MPLS’ private nature allows it to be a good candidate for secure cloud access, since public access is prevented by default. Cloud models that are “pay as you go” and “pay as you use” are very similar to how MPLS bandwidth capacity costs increase over time. The costs are not the same, but the model is similar in nature; potentially making bandwidth requirements decrease with cloud integration.
By design, MPLS creates a secure private virtual network that businesses can utilize for access to its business networks. MPLS is not architected to provide a publicly accessible network, but rather internal networking capabilities for its customers. To become public, router capabilities via a cloud, virtual or other Internet-based router must be used to provide access beyond the internal network. SD-WANs and SASE security can be beneficial in building a secure architecture to manage risks associated with making MPLS publicly available.
MPLS requires dedicated hardware, while SD-WAN solutions are software driven. With a software driven solution, it is much easier to provide real-time configurations and access to business applications and network services without interruption. SD-WAN allows for quicker, faster management of user access and because it is used with cloud computing, it can provide access to cloud applications that are not inherently attainable with MPLS alone. MPLS is private by design and requires integration support from solutions such as SD-WAN to be able to access.
Consider the items below when creating your vendor shortlist.
IT teams should consider the following components when comparing MPLS services.
MPLS inherently provides a private network that is walled off from the Internet. SD-WAN provides a device agnostic, scalable, fast, and consistent connection, in much the same way MPLS does, but because it is software based it makes it easier to provide on-demand changes to configurations and adjustments to security. SASE, secure access service edge is how WANs provide layered security. SASE, SD-WAN, and MPLS integrate to provide security at multiple points within a WAN topology.
Utilizing MPLS dedicated circuits and providing guaranteed uptime requirements for QoS, troubleshooting jitter and latency impacts resulting from MPLS implementation can be incorporated into vendor SLA requirements to provide customer satisfaction.
Edge routers can be used with cloud computing environments or SASE based architectures, or even in a combination of multiple environments. For MPLS, edge routers can provide end to end encryption within a VPN – encryption is not provided with MPLS by default; therefore, service providers can deploy edge services to support secure transmissions for MPLS and network transmissions.
MPLS provides dedicated circuits to multiple locations that can support one another in disaster recovery and business continuity services. MPLS can be configured such that primary and backup circuits can be enabled if primary services and capabilities are not available for a business to operate or continue its normal operations.
A typical MPLS architecture includes routers that provide different labels for transmissions along paths within a network. Label switching provides virtual point-to-point connections that individually transport traffic paths based on the labels that created for various traffic types. When transmission packets enter the MPLS architecture, the packets are assigned a label and forward to the appropriate path. Each MPLS router receives the label information and continues routing the packet to its intended destination. The label information continues to be switched to preserve bandwidth and ensure that the packet travels effortless to its intended target.
MPLS can be integrated with a VPN to provide remote access, utilizing a business’s existing Internet Service Provider (ISP) network. The MPLS network architecture creates a backbone in which users can VPN securely from virtually anywhere and access business services and networks without interruption.
MPLS is typically managed by a single service provider. Much of the equipment and services are provided by one vendor and network operations center (NOC) that provides traffic management, routing, and network and data management to ensure that traffic is optimized and delivered as expected. Support options typically consists of real time latency and routing provided by the vendor, ensuring that traffic is labelled appropriately, frame/packet loss is minimal, and availability is maintained at least 99% of the time.
