8JANUARY 2017In My OpinionWhat's Up With WANS?By Claire Rutkowski, CIO, Bentley SystemsToday's Wide Area Networks have become increasingly complex and difficult to manage. The deployment and operation of WAN connections can be a daunting manual process that expends valuable IT resources, drives up operating costs and hinders the ability of companies to respond quickly to new business opportunities or challenges. MWH Global, a Colorado-based engineering and construction management company with 135 offices worldwide, had a traditional WAN. But with the proliferation of mobile devices, the adoption of cloud-based services, the increasing use of high-bandwidth applications like video in branch offices, and the need to transfer and collaborate on large files, we were struggling to deliver an acceptable end-user experience while controlling our WAN bandwidth costs. Enter the Software-Defined WAN, or SD WAN.SD WANs promise to solve many of these common problems. But are SD WAN solutions ready for prime time? Can you implement an SD WAN solution without having to upgrade or replace your existing network infrastructure? The short answer is yes. You can implement a network that will enable true global integrated working and collaboration through the improved flow of data. At MWH, we started planning our SD WAN project in 2013, implemented in 2014, and are now enjoying the benefits. IMPLEMENTING SD WANOur SD Wan is built around a high-speed core comprised of four points of presence (POP) locations in Chicago, Sydney, London and Mumbai. These sites were chosen based on their global connectivity and access to high speed international network circuits. The branch network segment of the implementation was just as customized and purposeful. All MWH offices connected to the MWH Wide Area Network have at least one business-grade Internet circuit installed. A Dynamic Multipoint Virtual Private Network (DMVPN) is then built over the internet circuit and connects the office to the nearest POP location and a second POP location for resilience. If network traffic needs to be routed to another office in a region, then this action takes place over a DMVPN tunnel which is dynamically built on demand. If connectivity needs to be made to an office out of region, then routing takes place via the core network. CHALLENGES AND WAYS TO OVERCOME THEMOne of our biggest challenges, and likely yours if you are currently on a traditional WAN, is how to deal with parallel running costs while you make the transition. The new core network talked to the existing core network, allowing traffic to route between offices whether they had been migrated to the new network or not. This allowed for a phased migration, with branch migrations taking place as and when Internet circuits were provisioned, tested and verified ready for migration to the new network. The actual migrations were carried out during non-working hours in order to ensure that there was no impact to the business and no loss of productivity.MWH office span the globe. We do not have IT staff in each office. This presented us with another challenge: how to set up and configure routers with non-IT staff doing the work. We used a USB-based provisioning process to configure the routers at each office. A "branch migration kit", which contained the
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