For decades, the Local Area Network (LAN) was the heart of enterprise IT. It represented the immediate, high-speed connectivity within an office or campus. But in today’s cloud-first, globally distributed world, the very definition of “local” has expanded. The Wide Area Network (WAN) was considered to be the most expensive link. However, its high agility and intelligent fabric make it more reliable and help make LAN expand globally. The paradigm shift is clear: “WAN is the new LAN”.
This transformation hasn’t happened overnight. A lot of research hours went into this innovation, and it took more than 2 decades for the evolution. It’s a journey that began with the limitations of traditional Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) infrastructure, evolved through the revolutionary capabilities of Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN), and is now culminating in the promise of hyper-scale Cloud WAN.