Global network services provider Xalient, today announced that it has been awarded the Aruba Silver Peak EMEA Partner of the Year FY21 award, presented at the FY21 Aruba EMEA Channel Partner Awards Ceremony.
The Awards, hosted virtually by Silver Peak (acquired by Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, in 2020), recognise partners for excellence in sales and delivery of the Aruba EdgeConnect Platform across 2021.
Xalient has been part of the Silver Peak Partner Program since 2011 and, in that time, has heavily invested in Silver Peak sales and technical certifications. In March 2020, Xalient was awarded Certified Deployment Partner Accreditation – one of just nine organisations worldwide to have successfully obtained the certification– which recognises partners who have been chosen and trained to perform all facets of SD-WAN installation and deployment of Silver Peak products. Xalient is also recognised as a Silver Peak Platinum partner as a result of the significant Silver Peak technical certifications and sales it has achieved.
On receiving the Silver Peak EMEA Partner of the Year FY21 award, Xalient’s Group Chief Executive Officer, Sherry Vaswani said:
“We’re delighted to have been recognised as EMEA Silver Peak Partner of the Year 2021 as it evidences the great work we’ve done with Silver Peak and our customers over the course of the year and the continued investment we make in our partnership.”
“Xalient exists to help connect users and devices to applications and data and we’re proud to help our customers accelerate their digital transformation through best-of-breed technologies like the Aruba EdgeConnect platform”
“Thanks to our experience in global SD-WAN deployments, we’re ensuring that customers can implement SD-WAN technology in a quick and flexible way and I look forward to furthering success with Silver Peak as we move into 2022.”
About Xalient
Xalient is a disruptive network transformation company that specialises in software-defined networking, cloud security and unified communications, providing an innovative and independent alternative to traditional service providers. Our services are provided to large and global enterprises through a range of consulting and managed services, delivered from our offices in the UK and USA. For more information, visit: www.xalient.com.
About Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the global edge-to-cloud platform-as-a-service company that helps organizations accelerate outcomes by unlocking value from all of their data, everywhere. Built on decades of reimagining the future and innovating to advance the way we live and work, HPE delivers unique, open and intelligent technology solutions, with a consistent experience across all clouds and edges, to help customers develop new business models, engage in new ways, and increase operational performance. For more information, visit: www.hpe.com.
In the first part of my blog series, I provided some background on what Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is – effectively, IT leadership teams are looking to provide their clients (IT end users) with ultimate mobility to work from home, coffee shops or a traditional office environment and to do so in a completely secure fashion. This has accelerated the melding of the traditional Network and Security teams into a single entity.
In this blog entry, I will look more into the traditional elements to consider, from a network perspective, as an organisation adopts SASE.
Network Transformation
The majority of organisations I speak to day-to-day are looking to transform their traditional, expensive, dedicated network infrastructure into a blended model. Many have already adopted a Cloud-First strategy where their end users can access cloud-based applications straight from where they reside, rather than transporting all traffic to a traditional hub and spoke MPLS architecture to reach the internet. Applications, like O365, Salesforce.com, Oracle Cloud can be accessed by the end user at the edge.
This allows IT organisations to “right-size” their expensive MPLS networks and eliminate the latency introduced to the end user by backhauling that traffic across the country/globe.
SD-WAN Infrastructure
When going through a network transformation, it is imperative to understand the applications that are paramount to the end user’s success. For those organisations that are still heavily voice dependent – choosing an underlying SD-WAN partner with dynamic path selection, path conditioning and WAN acceleration capabilities is extremely important. We have seen this need accentuated now more than ever with the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Organisations are requiring their employees to work from home and tools like Skype for Business and Teams meetings are now more than ever the norm. Choosing the underpinning technology to support these requirements is paramount for an IT organisation.
It is also important to consider; does the technology have inherent next generation firewall (NGFW) capabilities? And can an IT organisation’s policies be easily applied to the SD-WAN environment, via a central orchestration management interface that provides full visibility into the network?
Lastly, it is important to consider scale. Many SD-WAN technologies are sufficient and certainly less costly dependent upon the number of locations that makeup the transformation. Once the number grows above 10-15 locations, the underlying SD-WAN technology needs to be able to scale. It’s within this scalability, or lack thereof, where a network transformation typically fails. The SD-WAN infrastructure must be able to grow and support the number of tunnels required for branch mesh tunnel configurations.
Carrier Agnostic
One of the most elementary considerations in a SASE enabled environment is the ability to leverage the most prevalent and often least expensive network links at the edge where an IT organisation’s clients reside.
Partnering with a traditional network carrier flies in the face of the basic SD-WAN premise of leveraging network links (broadband, ADSL, DIA, 4G, 5G) provided by the local cable company, LEC, or wireless carrier provides ultimate flexibility. Choosing a traditional MSP to provide this flexibility can result in the carrier looking to minimise their revenue write-downs by providing solutions that do not always meet the end client’s requirements. By maintaining a carrier agnostic approach, an IT organisation can meet the bandwidth requirements for their users at the Edge, with SLA backed network links that are orders of magnitude less expensive than a traditional MPLS network.
Typically, I have found that application performance for the end user improves significantly provided you are using the right SD-WAN technology over these less expensive network links.
Partner Selection
Many prospects or clients are looking to outsource their network transformations. This ranges from SD-WAN management, SD-WAN and carrier management via letter of authorisation, or a fully managed environment that includes carrier selection and management in addition to the SD-WAN.
It is important for an IT organisation to look for a partner that understands each IT organisations business drivers, applications, and existing capabilities to help define the managed service. It’s also important to partner with someone who understands the business drivers, as well as the different underlying technologies, and is able to marry the two together to help achieve the desired outcomes. Understanding the business drivers, how much involvement your IT staff want to take on and can your preferred partner support the current means of running your business (ITSM integration).
Finally, I would recommend choosing an SD-WAN managed service provider who has a proven track record with global deployments, to meet any future international growth requirements.
In the next blog entry, I will look at the Security elements that when combined with the network elements above, provide a robust SASE environment that provides a Secure experience for your IT end users over a “right-sized” network infrastructure.
We’re delighted to announce that Xalient has been awarded a place as a Crown Commercial Service (CCS) Supplier offering cloud services in the areas of networks, security and communications infrastructure.
The G-Cloud 11 Framework went live on 2 July 2019 enabling central government, local councils, NHS trusts and other public-sector organisations to purchase technologies such as SD-WAN and cloud security solutions.
Get in touch at hello@xalient.com if you’d like to know more about our services to the public sector.
G-Cloud is the UK government’s initiative to help public sector organisations easily adopt cloud-based and digital services. A new version of the framework is usually released every six to nine months with G-Cloud 11 being the latest iteration.
The framework is underpinned by the government’s ‘Cloud First’ policy and approach to IT, encouraging the public sector to make the most of cloud solutions rather than onsite alternatives. Organisations are able to search and choose from various suppliers offering cloud-based and digital technology services in the UK via the Digital Marketplace website with the peace of mind they are purchasing from an approved G-Cloud supplier.
The Digital Marketplace makes G-Cloud suppliers more easily accessible through a single website.
Services within the G-Cloud 11 framework are split into three categories: Cloud Software, Cloud Hosting and Cloud Support. The Digital Marketplace website streamlines the process of selling and purchasing cloud services, with each solution listing available with a complete specification breakdown.
In order to be listed, suppliers must undergo a rigorous application process to ensure they meet G-Cloud 11’s focus and requirements on cybersecurity, data security and security accreditations, along with meeting the necessary UK business legislation.
