Feature

Dawn of the virtual WAN

One of the factors that has pumped up the WAN market is robust demand for VPN technology. BFSI, e-trading and logistics are expected to set the pace for this market in 2007. By Tanu Talwar.

VPN technology is being adopted across the board. For years, voice, data, and just about all software-defined network services were dubbed virtual private networks by telephone carriers. Today’s VPN technology however, is a combination of tunnelling, encryption, authentication and access control technologies and services that are used to carry traffic over the Internet, a managed IP network or a provider’s backbone.

"With network traffic chocking on account of the increasing number of users, organisations have now started looking at the STM 1 and STM 2 links to improve performance" - Sanjay Kharade Principal Consultant CISCO, India and SAARC

The traffic reaches these backbones using any combination of access technologies, including T1, frame relay, ISDN, ATM or simple dial-up. VPNs use networking technology and protocols. The client sends a stream of encrypted Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) packets to a remote server or router instead of going across a dedicated line (as in the case of WANs), the packets go across a tunnel over a shared network. VPNs have the same security and encryption features as a private network, while taking the advantage of the economies of scale and remote accessibility of large public networks. According to Sanjay Kharade, principal consultant, Cisco, India and SAARC, “The key aspects accounting for the growing deployment of VPNs are increased productivity, stability, reliability, efficient manageability, coupled with the ease of deploying this technology across the enterprise.” KVSSS Gunneswara Rao, Director, D-Link India Ltd adds, “VPNs bring down costs through outsourcing of support overheads. With VPN, instead of the enterprise, it is the service provider that supports all necessary costs in terms of manpower, and technology as telecom service providers can spread this cost over thousands of potential customers.”

"With VPN, instead of the enterprise, it is the service provider that supports all necessary costs in terms of manpower, and technology" - KVSSS Gunneswara Rao Director D-Link India Ltd

The general idea behind using this method is that a company reduces the recurring telecommunications charges that are shouldered when connecting remote users and branch offices to resources that reside in a corporation’s headquarters. According to Frost & Sullivan, the IP VPN (IPSec VPN) market in India in 2005 was estimated at $151.9 million, a growth of 53.2 percent over the previous year. Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) has been driving the IP VPN market, largely due to its ability to offer frame relay features at a lower cost. Sourabh Khushal, industry manager-ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan India says, “We expect the IP VPN market to grow at 41 percent to $215 million in 2006. Between 2005 to 2011 we expect this market to grow at 21.7 percent CAGR.” He however says that traditional WAN services such as IPLS, ATM, and FR will see marginal (two to three percent) or even negative growth.

The demand for IP VPN is largely determined by enterprises having offices at multiple locations within and without the country. With MNCs including non-IT manufacturing companies, setting up offshore facilities and development centre, the need for IP VPN has gone up. BFSI, manufacturing, engineering, pharmaceuticals, R&D centres and even SMEs are consumers of this technology. P.K. Saji, Vice resident-Technology, Sify Ltd., says, “BFSI are looking at VPN solutions such as MPLS to connect their ATM centres and remote branches with their data centre. In 2007, as MPLS VPN matures, we will see more banks such as UCO, Bank of India and Union Bank of India moving away from using private networks such as TDM to MPLS VPNas reduces the networking costs significantly. Other verticals that will drive the adoption of IPSec VPN are retail and logistics.”

An interesting point to note is that as per RBI’s directive, it is mandatory for co-operative, public and private sector banks to implement a Core Banking Solution (CBS) and offer online connectivity at remote locations. This has also contributed to the growth of IPSec VPN. The same i the case financial institutions and the telecom sector. “Even SMEs are competing in the global market to sustain growth and ramp up operations ig investments are being made in creating the backbone infrastructure and IP VPN has become the preferred choice for e-mail, browsing, remote database access and Intranets. IP VPN implementations can be extended by deploying MPLS technology. MPLS gives network operators the flexibility to divert and route traffic around link failures, congestion and bottlenecks,” says Khushal.

As compared to the private networks, IPSec VPN supports value-added services and facilities such as VoIP, bandwidth on demand and the like. Many large enterprises are using a MPLS VPN network for real-time access to their core applications such as ERP, CRM, SCM and BI.

There have been security issues with IPSec VPNs and many claim that it cannot provide secure remote access. IPSec does not work in an extended enterprise network, and is only good for site-to-site VPNs.

SSL and IPSec to co-exist

Some security issues raised IPSec VPN are addressed by SSL VPN and it is gaining momentum in the market. SSL VPN works at OSI Layer 4. When a client establishes an SSL connection handshake with a server, the server is authenticated to the client, verifying that the server’s certificate and public ID are valid and have been issued by a trusted certificate authority. Then the client and server negotiate and select a cryptographic algorithm that they both support. The client may then be authenticated to the server, and an encrypted SSL connection can be established. An SSL VPN provides strong security for remote access and do not require a complex client unlike IPSec. This makes it easier to install and support, leading to cost savings. SSL is pre-installed in every major browser, making SSL VPN a client-less solution. An IPSec VPN requires a device-specific client installation on the remote end-user side of a secure tunnel. Keeping these clients updated is an ongoing burden. Khushal adds, “SSL VPN will see higher growth; a 32 percent CAGR from 2005 to 2010 compared to 20.7 percent CAGR for IPSec VPN during the same period. Banks have started deploying it. ISPs, BPOs and e-traders are also expected to follow suit.”

iGATE uses both IPSec and SSL VPN he latter has integrated well with the third-party security solutions that iGATE uses and it does not need a dedicated authentication server. The company admits there is no need to install a client for running an SSL VPN, whereas IPSec VPN is heavily dependent on client software, with SSL VPN there is no need to procure concurrent licences for each and every employee—a clear return-on-investment factor. Marico is another company that uses SSL VPN.

Large businesses are facing an issue of poor application performance and slow connectivity on the Wide Area Network (WAN).

Pressing the pedal to the WAN metal

Companies have long sought a way to bring down the high cost of WAN links and clamoured for a means to access WAN resources at LAN speeds. In order to achieve this goal, more and more companies are now adopting WAN accelerators to boost the speed of accessing enterprise applications and optimise bandwidth. These accelerators use a number of techniques such as compression, application of quality of service (QoS) and chiefly work towards speeding up transmission over a wide area network. Kharade, explains, “if an application is chatty and requires constant usage and updation, the WAN accelerator speeds up transmission by transferring the content required behind the scenes. For example, Windows file sharing (CIFS protocol) is slow over a WAN. A CIFS WAN accelerator can pre-fetch data at the server side and transfer it to the client side so that most of the CIFS interaction takes place locally.”

However, Kharade, believes, “The industry is growing exponentially. The WAN market has grown manifold overthe past five years and has undergone dramatic changes in 2006. In 2005, organisations were going in for traditional WAN links, 64 Kbps to 2 Mbps. However, with network traffic chocking on account of the increasing number of users, organisations have now started looking at the STM 1 and STM 2 links to improve performance.” A network that covered about 200 to 400 sites last year, encompasses about 4,000-5,000 sites today.

In Kharade’s mind WANs owe their popularity to the accelerator market. He says “Even though the WAN acceleration market is relatively new, it has shown great potential over the last year. It has moved beyond the early adopter phase into the mainstream, as enterprises understand how much the solution can do for them and want to deploy it everywhere on the enterprise WAN.” In 2006, enterprises experimented with this technology on a limited scale in a handful of locations. Today they want to roll it out globally to hundreds of branch offices to stay connected with their remote workers.

Nagendra Venkaswamy, managing director, Juniper, India and SAARC states “Applications are demanding more from wide area networks (WANs). Today’s WAN solutions must provide wider reach, greater application awareness, and acceleration to improve response times, all the while lowering the cost of implementation and operation.” The first and the foremost challenge facing enterprises is the high price of WAN links. Even though the cost has come down in the recent years, They’re far from inexpensive.

Network Congestion

Umesh Shrivastav, managing director, Accton EI-EN, India, states, “As a company grows it becomes imperative to bring about virtualisation, ensuring transparency across its distributed network running across locations.” Besides these bottlenecks there are three main pain points that need to be tackled irstly, inefficiencies that creep into the system such as low response time, data duplication security concerns that affect customer relationship management have to be dealt with. Secondly, service providers need to arm customers with an efficient backup plan to avoid contingencies. And thirdly, a system to lower cost and avoid latency for systems running on the satellite links is needed.

A major factor that generates traffic on the network causing it to slow down is underestimating the load that the network will have to bear. This results in organisations opting for lower bandwidth than they actually need. However, as an organisation sets up more branches, the number of users accessing the network shoots up either slowing the network to a crawl or resulting in temporary malfunctions when usage rises suddenly at times such as taking inventory stock or processing payroll. Kiran Bhagwanani, vice president, Apac Sales, HCL Comnet asserts, “It’s of utmost importance that enterprises analyse and understand their bandwidth requirement. Going for the right quantum of bandwidth can help an organisation overcome several hurdles. Most often the usage of the network increases when an application becomes popular.”

Network congestion only gets worse as an enterprise adds converged technologies and applications. There is growing realisation amongst enterprises about the advantages of evolving technologies such as VoIP, video conferencing etc. The obvious result of this realisation is the booming demand for these technologies. Even though enterprises opt for such solutions to enhance their business, lack of planning renders the network inefficient. Shrivastav, says, “Often enterprises add complex applications for enhancing productivity without increasing the bandwidth. The percentage of bandwidth required varies from application to application. For example voice and data may work well with a certain bandwidth, adding video conferencing may require the network to pump in more bandwidth to perform as desired.”

Many organisations have a priority list describing the hierarchy of different applications. Kharade explains, “While in some organisations, voice is given higher priority, in others video is sought after. However, the list is decided keeping in mind the level of latency that the medium can handle.”

In order to provide full hands on experience to the customer network providers either have to add bandwidth or provide services and solutions that accelerate applications. Venkaswamy believes, “Adding bandwidth to the network may not always be the right thing to do as there are many reasons causing a network to act the way that it does. If an organisation keeps adding converged technologies and bandwidth simultaneously, at times all the data, voice, videos and other application may start flowing together which will not improve response time but make things worse.” Pumping in additional bandwidth every now and then is not as easy as it appears. Then again, there is a limit to which bandwidth can be stretched. Kharade, opines, “Exceeding bandwidth every time a new technology comes in to play does not make sense. Even though the option may be successful for an SME it’s not viable for a large enterprise as it keeps adding to operational expenditure.”

WAN acceleration is being touted as the magic bullet for this problem. With the increase in the number of users there are two major trends emerging in the market—link optimisation and application acceleration. Link optimisation works on point point links that provide a single, pre-established WAN communication path from the customer premises through a carrier network, such as a telephone company, to a remote network. Point-to-point lines are usually leased from a carrier and thus are often called leased lines. Link optimisation helps minimising the traffic and can mange maximum traffic efficiently.

While link optimisation helps reduce traffic, application acceleration is a technique used for higher level protocols. It aims to improve response time by reducing handshakes between the data centre and branches of a company. According to Venkaswamy, “Demand for WAN accelerators has risen over the past year. Accelerators help increase the life of a network without reengineering it.”