IT directors and network administrators today have a tough job. They somehow need to balance an ever-expanding collection of mission-critical applications with the rising costs of private WAN solutions. The cloud has only made this more difficult. Many private and hybrid cloud resources as well as Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, such as the Office 365 application, can quickly monopolize the available bandwidth leading to unacceptable latency issues. In response to this dynamic, companies are looking to leverage the internet to route critical traffic as opposed to dumping more money into their private WAN contracts. Cisco offers an Intelligent Wide Area Network (IWAN) solution, and it has the potential to drastically improve performance and cut costs.

What Is An Intelligent WAN?
On one level, an intelligent WAN is just like any other wide area network. It connects the office’s local area network (LAN) to the wide reaches of the web. It is the highway by which office staff can access the internet. Cisco IWAN takes this concept one step further and provides network administrators an additional level of control. Instead of being structured with primary pathways flooded with traffic and secondary pathways waiting in the wings, an IWAN can alleviate congestion in the WAN and improve performance.