A Beginner's Guide To Adaptive Private Networking

By Author: Craigie Jones
Total Articles: 66
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Imagine business 100 years ago, 50 even. It used to be that salesmen and clients talked in person, perhaps by phone or over drinks or on the golf course. There was no broadband Internet, no fax machines, no video conferencing. Business and life was simpler, if slower.

Fast forward to the 21st century. Each decade over the past several has seen near-exponential growth in the development of technology with the landscape now so radically evolved and changed that the business world of a half-century past looks foreign and prehistoric. Presentations that would happen with PowerPoint today were seemingly done on cave walls in the 1960s. The modern office looks wholly incongruous by comparison.

Today, business happens in more ways than ever, which is a good thing for profits when all is said and done. Closing deals and making money is generally a quicker process end to end today. But it also means that companies have had to contend with rising technology costs, and for smaller firms, this can be especially challenging. There are methods to offset this, of course, and one of them is something known as Adaptive Private ...
... Networking.

In essence, Adaptive Private Networking or APN appliances boost bandwidth at low costs for businesses that use a wide area network or WAN. The APN appliances bring together economical and easily obtained bandwidth from Internet service providers and offer the companies that use them secure, high-end connections. This is done through the use of technologies such as MPLS or frame relay.

This creates "network visualization," essentially a combo of broadband bandwidth and MPLS for the network, ensuring reliable and high quality connections without any lag. It's cost-efficient as well, since the appliances use as much bandwidth as possible and don't sacrifice quality.

If this all sounds fairly dry, that's because it is. Here's the reality. Adaptive Private Networking offers a number of benefits to companies that use it, including:

* It's cost effective for firms large and small
* It's scalable, with different levels of service available depending on a company's need
* It's efficient, with companies not having to let valuable bandwidth go to waste while other departments go without
* Most APN services have data backup and regulatory services to offer maximum protection to companies that use them

It's been a long time since business was done on cave walls, but all things considered, the modern picture doesn't look bad. APN is a fitting part of the mosaic.

Grant Womack is the author of this article on emerging trends in network virtualization and the use of technologies such as MPLS in this area.