Xalient

The critical foundation for digital transformation

As digital transformation programs evolve, it’s becoming clearer than ever that network transformation is both a strategic imperative and the critical enabler for success. The network is your new digital foundation and must be fit for purpose to support today’s cloud-enabled business, agile to meet changing business demands, and most urgently, totally secure. If you’re responsible for IT infrastructure in a company with multiple sites connected by an MPLS-based WAN, running a mix of applications – some in your data centres, some in the cloud – then we imagine that you’re most likely to be facing these five major challenges today.

Five key challenges

I need better performance, reliability and user experience from corporate applications. Whether located in the cloud or in your data centres, your apps just aren’t performing as well as your company needs, or users promised.
I want more visibility and control over WAN traffic. You don’t have enough visibility over the types of traffic flowing over your networks. Traffic volumes are increasing, and it’s difficult to make informed decisions over how much extra capacity you should plan to deploy in future.
I want more control over network costs. The MPLS circuits connecting your sites are expensive. Continually adding extra capacity to carry exponentially growing traffic volumes is way too costly.
We need to be agile to react quickly to business needs. MPLS networks come with long lead times – up to 90 working days to provision a circuit, for example. You need to be able to configure and deploy your network much faster. And integrate acquisitions faster too.
I need security that’s fit for the cloud. Given an increasingly hostile threat landscape, security continues, of course, to be of the highest priority. Managing an ever changing perimeter and ensuring identity authentication and access is secure across your systems is crucial but challenging.

Piling more pressure on already pressurised network architectures.

Setting aside issues with cost and provisioning times, the familiar hub-and-spoke MPLS WAN architecture has, in the past, been well-suited to the task of carrying traffic securely to and from branch offices and data centres. It’s a network approach that made sense when all your applications ran from the data centre. But it’s becoming increasingly unsuitable to the evolving usage and traffic patterns your firm likely sees today:

Cloud-hosted applications. More corporate applications run in the cloud and account for evermore internet traffic to and from your data centres. As traffic to and from these applications converges in the link from your data centre to the cloud, user experience suffers.
Personal use of IT. When all your traffic travels over the WAN, it’s hard to manage the impact on corporate applications of increasingly common personal use of IT, such as watching streaming video. Without an easy way to divert or de-prioritise this traffic, personal use ends up hitting corporate application performance.
Device proliferation. Employees are increasingly accessing corporate applications from a much wider range of devices and locations. As a result, it gets ever harder to deliver a good performance for users accessing applications running in the cloud when devices are connecting via a range of different networks, all of which generate traffic backhauled through an ever more complex and expensive data centre security stack.

Cloud computing is growing exponentially

Employees are increasingly mobile and working remotely

Demand for bandwidth is increasing year on year

It’s time to rethink your network.
With SD-WAN and a SASE Approach.

Working with market-leading SD-WAN and cloud security technology partners, Xalient offers a managed SD-WAN solution and Cloud Security Platform that enables you to:

Connect your company’s offices and data centres using broadband connections as well as MPLS circuits.
Break out traffic locally to the Internet and cloud-hosted applications from branch offices – without backhauling it going via your corporate data centres
Experience good QoS over relatively inexpensive broadband connections.

Secure Access Service Edge – SASE

SASE is a new unified approach that combines a global software-defined network service with firewalls, secure edge gateways, cloud security monitoring and advanced threat protection. The term was coined by Gartner in 2019 as an emerging area in IT services that meets the needs of modern, cloud-centric businesses. At Xalient, we’ve seen the value of combining SD-WAN and cloud security for some time and we work with leading vendors to deliver the benefits and meet the business demands of global clients. Let’s look in more detail at the three key technologies that we combine in our SASE services.

First an SD-WAN solution creates a secure, virtual overlay network, agnostic to the underlying transport technology, which lets you use either broadband connections or MPLS circuits. Techniques such as Dynamic Path Control and Path Conditioning deliver private-line-like QoS even over broadband connections. Our solution will also give you high levels of visibility and control over the different types of traffic passing over your network, enabling informed decision making in real-time. Next, a cloud security platform creates a secure perimeter between your branch offices and the Internet. This means you can securely break out Internet traffic at your branch office without it travelling through your data centre security stacks en route to the Internet. The solution constantly scans Internet traffic for threats at the perimeter, preventing these from entering your network. Finally, an identity and access control solution, integrated into your transformed network, ensures that only the right people get access to the role or location appropriate systems, simply and securely, making new deployments secure, rapid and simple to manage and significantly reducing your corporate security risk.

Realise the benefits and get SASE with Xalient.

We specialise in helping global companies transform their networks, from strategy and design through to choosing, deploying and managing secure, flexible, and reliable solutions. We’re increasingly utilising software-defined technologies to deliver agility and superior performance whilst accelerating our customers’ business performance.

Working with the leading vendors, we can help you:

Improve the user experience of corporate applications by prioritising different types of traffic and reducing pressure on connections to the data centre by breaking out traffic to the Internet from local branch offices.
Improve your firm’s agility by letting you connect branch offices to your corporate WAN in less time, using existing broadband connections, avoiding lengthy MPLS provisioning timescales and enabling you to setup and reconfigure your WAN faster.
Drive down cost by replacing expensive MPLS circuits with less expensive broadband connections, shifting the security perimeter for Internet traffic to the edge of the cloud, reducing the complexity and cost of data centre security stacks. Plus adopting a multi-carrier strategy to take advantage of global carriers that best match your business footprint and needs.
Create an agile and future-proofed network, built on a SASE architecture, able to flex to suit your business needs, built for the cloud, and ultimately secure, from your perimeter to your people.

A high-performance modern network designed specifically to support your cloud investments

Network agility – with rapid speed of deployment, change and refresh

A multi-carrier strategy to match your global business needs and avoid lock-in

Dynamic bandwidth management

Advanced cloud security

Remote management and AI-driven proactive problem resolution

Cost savings

Superior customer
experience

SD-WAN and SASE use cases

SD-WAN, coupled with cloud security into a SASE solution, is the modern option for large, multi-site enterprises and governments wanting to accelerate their digital transformation; . Read and identify with some of the typical challenges we see our clients’ facing as they choose to transition to SASE with Xalient.

Migrating to the cloud, with escalating bandwidth requirements and new security challenges
Having an increasingly mobile and dispersed workforce
Requiring rapid deployment of connectivity, for acquisitions or new sites or branches
Wanting to avoid carrier lock-in and move to a multi-carrier approach
Deploying voice/video and requiring Quality of Service across all WAN/Internet technologies.
Requiring optimisation of applications across your WAN
Needing to ensure your apps are fully secure
Looking for a cloud alternative for VPN

SD-WAN Use Cases

Security & identity. Built in.

We believe that with Network Transformation it’s critical that network security as well as identity and access controls is built in from the start.

We help our clients through the full lifecycle of risk management stages to they meet their business’s needs and requirements. Our experience of implementing leading edge cloud-security solutions to complement SD-WAN deployments is second to none, so you can be sure that your network is in safe hands.

Learn more about Security

SD-WAN managed service. Where your objectives become ours.

Transforming your network is complex and intricate – a tough ask of your IT team to add to the projects they’re already working on. Xalient’s Managed SD-WAN services simplifies and scales the management of your WAN, allowing your IT team to remain focused on core strategic business projects.

With Xalient Managed Services, we take away the complexity involved in establishing and managing a multi-vendor environment, ensuring you get the best value and performance whilst avoiding being locked in with carriers.

Find out more about Xalient Managed Services

Case study SD-WAN drives network performance & keeps manufacturer globally connected.

The company wanted a solution that would improve user experience by balancing traffic over separate connections; prioritize real-time traffic to deliver good QoS on voice calls, having recently switched to using Skype for Business; and align its network and cloud strategies.

Read the Case Study

Global ISP services

We help customers through the process of designing, sourcing, implementing and managing their internet-centric networks, whether they be MPLS, hybrid or SD-WAN, ensuring they get the optimum broadband services to support their business.

We take away the hassle of contracting with carriers and use our expert knowledge to source you the best fit for quality and reliability at any time. If you’re moving to a multi-carrier strategy with SD-WAN, we can handle all existing contracts and their migration, taking away the heavy resource requirement and giving you valuable time back to focus on your other technology priorities.

Read our blog 'SD-WAN: The Case for Independent Managed Services'

LAN & Wi-Fi

Your infrastructure plays a critical role in how your company navigates today’s digital landscape. A modern network is built upon infrastructure that accelerates business growth.

We help our clients ensure their LAN and Wi-Fi systems are fit for purpose to support their network transformation. Many LANs are now becoming outdated and unsupportable and even recently installed WiFi systems are no longer meeting businesses’ needs.

Our network experts support clients with the following services:

Case study Global media company transforms its network.

One of the largest media recording companies in the world, employing in excess of 3,500 people in more than 50 countries worldwide, turned to Xalient to help transform its global communication network.

Read the case study

Get in touch

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Software-defined networking and SASE