Masergy is adding a new option to its SD-WAN service, making it easier for customers who want to keep their MPLS connections for most enterprise services to also dump other traffic to the public Internet locally. (See Masergy Adds SD-Wan Option.)

The new offering, Masergy SD-WAN Go, joins Masergy SD-WAN Pro in the company portfolio, both being fully managed services, Masergy CTO Tim Naramore says in an interview. It was developed in response to enterprise customer feedback, for companies that weren't going to go "all in" on SD-WAN but wanted a low-cost option for handling traffic -- often video -- that is clogging up their MPLS connections.

"What we were looking for on this pass was really something that embraced the concept of local Internet offload, for those companies that weren't ready to get rid of their MPLS or private network connections, but don't want to keep increasing the cost and size of those services because of YouTube or people watching Netflix on their lunch hours," Naramore comments. "Those are the network bandwidth hogs."

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In addition to that option, customers wanted some other options including embedded firewalls -- so they didn't have to deploy another box -- and zero-touch provisioning from the Masergy portal. So the SD-WAN Go product includes those capabilities and WAN optimization as well. MPLS traffic is tunneled to the Masergy PoP and from there to the MPLS backbone, using standard protocols to eliminate the need to put proprietary boxes at every data center and premises location.

"The only change to that -- if they are using one of our marketplace connections to Azure or Google or AWS, that traffic will go over encrypted tunnel," Naramore notes. "That way, they get the benefits of private connectivity to the cloud, with security and performance."

The latter option becomes more critical in global markets where public Internet connections into popular clouds may have to traverse many hops.

The Masergy SD-WAN Go was developed in a tight timeframe -- about two and a half months -- in cooperation with key vendors that Masergy isn't identifying at this time. The SD-WAN Pro managed service is based on SilverPeak technology.

In its current iteration, SD-WAN Go uses a premises-based device, but it should also be available shortly as a virtualized network function (VNF) that can be deployed on Masergy's virtual CPE.

— Carol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading

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