* The logical argument for network-based services
In the last newsletter, we discussed, especially for the benefit of those who have not lived in this industry for the past 20 to 30 years, some of the factors that led to the “great divide” between the data communications (a.k.a. WAN) professionals and the telephone companies, now more appropriately called “service providers.”
And we didn’t even get into the extent to which the court rulings – such as those prohibiting the phone companies from providing data processing and “protocol conversion” – made it almost impossible for the phone companies to do business. (For instance, in the late 1980s, it was not at all clear whether it would be legal for a service provider to offer frame relay to ATM interworking.)
This combination of factors, fueled by a lot of healthy egos, has resulted in a generation of data networking professionals who can make a credible argument that everything possible should be done on site, and we should keep network services to a minimum.
At the same time, there’s also a good argument for a reality check. Just as T-1 circuits should have been rerouted within the network (as mentioned in the last newsletter), there are many services where it can be reasonably argued that they should reside in the network.
One of the most obvious of these is the network-based firewall. One of the most significant bottlenecks in today’s network remains the access link. Network-based firewalls would keep malicious traffic further away from the customer premises. Further, the economies of scale and timeliness of updating a network-based firewall as opposed to multiple individual firewalls are a no-brainer. The same argument can be made for spam filtering for e-mail.
And then there’s the bandwidth issue. If you insist in premises-based firewalls, all Internet-bound traffic from remote sites either must traverse your access links twice – to the central site to be filtered and then back out – or you must maintain and update firewalls at each site.
Now, the arguments for network-based appliances are expanding to multiple arenas, including the very hot application performance market. In fact, the logical reasons for having more functions based in the network and fewer at the customer site are growing exponentially.
But this takes a fundamental shift in thinking. In particular, the networking professional must trust the service provider to provide the service reliably and with a lower total cost of ownership than can be provided in the BYOB (Be Your Own Bell) era.
Are you ready for this shift? Let us know your thoughts, and we’ll share the feedback in future newsletters.
