Light Reading recognises Colt’s SD WAN strategy as industry’s most innovative

Published by Stuart Brameld on May 30, 2019

Colt has been recognised as having the most innovative Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD WAN) deployment strategy at the Leading Lights Awards at the Big Communications Event in Austin Texas.

The awards, held by international telecommunications publication Light Reading, celebrate next-generation technologies and services that drive forward innovation in the industry. The winners were chosen following the judging of hundreds of submissions in 23 categories, which this year included recognition for those companies making progress in 5G strategy, digital enablement and technology vision as well as NFV, IoT and SDN.

Colt’s SD WAN offering was awarded for its dramatically simplified approach to deploying and managing remote branch office connectivity. By leveraging the stability, resiliency and QoS of private MPLS based IPVPN connectivity, with the flexibility and affordability of public internet transport, Colt has developed a hybrid WAN network, where customers can offload non critical data to a secured Internet tunnel, freeing up MPLS bandwidth for business critical data.

“We have challenged the status quo with our first-to-market native SD WAN solution, owing to an agile development approach,” said Mirko Voltolini, VP Technology and Architecture at Colt. “Our aim is to increase the rate of innovation by making the wide area network an elastic platform on which to deliver future services based on software in an agile manner. With the adoption of software controlled WAN, the network becomes more agile, flexible and adapted to our customers’ increasingly demanding business needs, putting them in control.”

Colt’s SD WAN offering provides customers with more bandwidth to their branches by supplementing private connections with lower cost Internet. Speed of delivery is improved through the use of existing Internet and customer self-install, which removes long lead times to deploy and upgrade local private connections. Internet traffic from customer branches to the WAN is secured through the use of IPSec tunnels and Internet breakout can be central or local protected by an integrated firewall.

A superior customer experience is provided through a simple to use portal, with analytics features, where traffic is steered over internet/MPLS on an application by application basis. Both access methods are available in active:active mode and can be switched in real time via the portal based on thresholds for bandwidth, latency, jitter, packet loss or link failure.

For more information on Colt’s SD WAN solution, please visit here.

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