You Need to Review Your WAN Environment Now

Future-Proof Your Architecture at Renewal Time

Regardless of whether you stick with your existing solution or move to a new one, the most useful thing you can do before the end of your contract term is to assess what’s working and what’s not. Many businesses have legacy MPLS contracts, which have been a well-loved solution for good reason. But relying on MPLS alone is the norm of a bygone era where branch offices sent traffic to a central headquarters. In a world where workers need direct access to the cloud, you must review your WAN environment to ensure it still makes business sense.

When undertaking this process, there are four key pillars you need to consider to ensure your infrastructure is modernised and resilient.

1. Bandwidth Requirements

One of the most important aspects of a future-proofed architecture is ensuring you have bandwidth that’s the right fit for your needs. High bandwidths are hard to achieve with MPLS alone; upgrading is often difficult, costly, and involves lengthy installation lead times. When you review your WAN environment, ask yourself:

• Which of our internal applications require Quality of Service (QoS)?
• Are these applications bandwidth-constrained?
• What is the actual bandwidth required on a regular basis?

SD-WAN technology often pips MPLS to the post here, offering flexible and cost-effective solutions to increase capacity and performance across the board.

2. Network Visibility

Where is your traffic going? Does your business still have legacy QoS requirements, or is the lay of the land different today? Without visibility, sound decision-making is impossible. Implementing an SD-WAN or hybrid solution allows you to review your WAN environment with real data. You might find you can supplement MPLS with low-cost internet carriage to “right-size” your spend, often reducing costs by 30% to 50% while eliminating expensive legacy network equipment.

3. Performance and Resilience

Once you have visibility, you can ask detailed questions about network services. Would your organisation benefit from dynamic bandwidth or increased security? Designing an architecture that supports your specific needs—such as automatically directing traffic over available links if one fails—ensures your business remains operational regardless of local outages.

4. Service Assurance

Two access links are always better than one. While some believe “internet-grade” services can’t match MPLS, the reality is that most WAN traffic is now cloud-based and offers no QoS after it leaves the central network anyway. When you review your WAN environment, you’ll likely find that you are bandwidth-constrained rather than QoS-limited. SD-WAN solutions rely on multiple access links, providing a level of redundancy that a single MPLS circuit simply cannot offer.

Your Network Architecture Checklist

The procurement process takes so long that by the time a review is finished, you may face commercial penalties that make it difficult to move. The best way forward is to know what you want well in advance of the contract renewal. Whether you make a full switch or integrate existing MPLS into a new environment, you must consider flexibility, remote access, and security.

For more technical insights into modernised wide area networks, the nbn™ Enterprise Ethernet guide offers excellent information on high-performance carriage options available in Australia.

At Orro, we specialise in helping you identify what’s important to your systems. If you’re ready to review your WAN environment and achieve true visibility over your architecture, talk to us today for a free network assessment.