DIY Or Managed SD-WAN: What About Co-Managed?
By Tricia Png, Regional Director, Asia, for Silver Peak
Tricia Png, Regional Director, Asia, for Silver Peak
There are business benefits derived from moving to an OPEX WAN service consumption model in favor of a traditional CAPEX model.
CONVERGED SD-WAN SOLUTIONS: THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
This got me to thinking about the possibilities of merging both models and led me to a thought provoking question. Is there a way for enterprises to have the best of both worlds from DIY and managed?
A co-managed SD-WAN service provides enterprises with the flexibility to self-manage their application and security policies, while enabling the MSP to manage the overall connectivity, customer experience and network SLAs by paying a monthly service bill. A customer-specific orchestration instance provides an online configuration tool to tailor policies based on each customer’s unique business requirements. The co-managed option enables MSPs to offer enterprises the flexibility to change defined parameters of their overlay, and still remain within a managed SD-WAN SLA.
Co-Managed SD-WAN Structure of Responsibilities:
As the chart above shows, the co-managed scenario would enable enterprises to define their own application and security policies and configure “their own business intent overlays” for their wide area network locations via a customer-enabled orchestrator within an MSP’s SD-WAN web management interface such as Silver Peak Unity OrchestratorSP.
The demand for a co-managed SD-WAN service alternative is increasingly cropping up in discussions with enterprise IT directors. For example, an IT director may want to create and self-select a business intent overlay policy for distinct groups of SaaS applications such as SFDC, SAP or Skype for Business and have the ability to do this without requiring the MSP’s intervention.
A co-managed SD-WAN service based on the Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnectSP SD-WAN solution offers distinct advantages to both MSPs and enterprises.
A co-managed option empowers enterprises to customize their own application QoS and security policies to enhance the customer experience, but with a shared accountability for managing and maintaining application performance in accordance with SLAs.
For MSPs, it enables the service provider to leverage its self-service portal to provide the flexibility for enterprises to also contract locations that are fully managed or co-managed. It also provides opportunity to sell higher-value analytics/visibility integration and consulting services to optimize application performance on behalf of their enterprise customers.
From my perspective, a co-managed model is a win/win for both MSPs and enterprises alike.
