Corporate Networking Services of Tomorrow: Business-Aware VPNs

Serving Business Customers: New VPN Requirements

There is a clear trend in the telecommunications enterprise market to increase the value of the service provider’s product portfolio. On the one hand, CIOs are looking to further reduce costs and improve the productivity of the company’s distributed business processes (Figure 1). On the other hand, they would prefer to opt for a more disruptive model and shift their network service strategy from enhancing productivity to value creation with new business processes and collaborative applications enabled by new communications technologies. For that reason, emerging “new generation” communications services will have an increasingly significant impact on enterprise and industry business processes. These services have to support communication-critical applications in the changing environment of network and service convergence. Therefore, VPNs, a key component of an enterprise service offering, are evolving to shift the focus from multiple site connectivity to applications, collaborations, individuals, and communities of individuals. The range of applications is huge, from healthcare solutions requiring very high robustness to networked industry facilities and services such as online market exchanges, which require very low latency and delay variation.