Comprising of four elements – managed underlay, reactive underlay, fully managed underlay and a fully managed service – the expanded offering is designed to meet the diverse requirements of organisations’ network managers amid growing appetite to manage their network overlays in-house.
Businesses are turning to SD-WAN to reduce costs, strengthen connectivity and gain greater control and visibility of their networks.
Organisations are choosing to manage the overlay – the logical network component of SD-WAN, which uses network virtualisation to build connectivity on top of physical infrastructure.
Jonathan Wright, director of products and operations at GCX said: “Recent advances in SD-WAN management software mean organisations that would never have dreamed of managing their wide area networks are now able to. However, the underlay aspect can still be complicated for many.
“We want to ensure more organisations’ Data is Made Scalable. And that means adapting how we engage with them to meet them when they need support.”
However, with most firms using more than one network or cloud provider, identifying and addressing any challenges with the underlay – the physical network connection, typically the internet – can be complex.
With the launch of the new network underlay services, customers can procure support for their specific SD-WAN management needs, allowing GCX to augment the capabilities of customer in-house teams rather than duplicating their efforts.
Wright added: “Our expanded network underlay portfolio offers companies the option of employing us as an intermediary with carriers and vendors or choosing a full end-to-end managed service.
“Either way, as many move toward self-management of the network overlay, they’re able to augment their existing SD-WAN solutions without the headache of having to manage the complexity of the underlay.”
