DIY Or Managed SD-WAN: What About Co-Managed?

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.