After his presentation on enterprise networks and the core global networks underlying them, Telegeography’s Rob Schult then moderated the final panel at WAN Frankfurt on WAN architecture in the modern workplace. Joining him were panellists Marius Venter, consulting systems engineer at Aruba, Oliver Burgstaller, director of advanced business solutions at Riverbed and Marco van den Akker, VP of nearly everything at Tinc Works.
On the topic of quality of service, Akker who was representing Tinc Works, which deals largely with small to medium enterprises said: “quality of service is something you agree with your provider when you have a clear strategy that you’re trying to achieve. This is easier for the large enterprises who have the people and resources to do this, but the small to mid-market enterprises will find this harder to define.”
Burgstaller says it’s the performance of the end-user which is the ultimate priority. “The challenge we’re seeing everywhere is no one really has an understanding of what the performance for the end-user is and they’re making decisions based on this.”
On the future of SD-WAN in the modern day working environment, Burgstaller summed it up best in saying: “Digitisation means optimisation and maintenance.”
“WAN isn’t necessarily important to our customers, what is important is simplicity,” added Venter. Also touching upon the much talked about subject of 5G. “What is going to be the impact of 5G of WAN, nobody knows because nobody knows what it’s going to do,” said Venter. “We need to make sure we in a position to leverage these new technologies.”
On the topic of security Venter said: “if you don’t have some sort of secure mind-set, then I don’t think customers will take you that seriously. I think assumed security is the worst kind of security. I’d rather have no security and know I’m not secure, because if I think I’m secure I’m not going to be watching.”
“Network security is like not reading a manual, they are just connecting with no thought and not reading the instructions first,” added Akker.
With topics like 5G rearing its head, there was no doubt that the other biggest ticket topic, IoT would come up as well.
“IoT is interesting from a consumer perspective, but not in our everyday business environment”, said Akker.
‘IoT is here to stay and that’s the number 1 challenge for customers today. We need to address this challenge for our customers and the way we get there is through micro-segmentation,’ said Venter.
