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If IT is the enterprise engine, then connectivity services is the driver that makes the engine chug along. The need for connectivity services has been on the rise significantly. On the enterprise side of things, one saw the beginning of the trend of moving from point-to-point connectivity to point-to-multipoint and linking multiple geographical locations with variable bandwidth.

The connectivity choice is dependent on requirements such as reliability, reach, security, capacity and cost.

Services like IP-VPN, enabled enterprises to reduce costs by implementing virtual networks. With the shift to IP, the requirement for a single network providing all the services gained predominance. Meanwhile, the international connectivity options available to customers increased with new cable systems becoming operational and with number of new ones in the pipeline. With connectivity options expanding security became a major issue for enterprise networks with threats to networks becoming frequent and more complicated.

Over the last one year another key trend relates to SEZ development driving the expansion of connectivity. For instance Airtel entered into a MoU with Adani Group on Mundra SEZ to roll out end-to-end telecom solutions. It has the distinction of being one of the first of its kind alliance with an SEZ developer and it's the exclusive telecom partner for them the next seven years. Lets here look at some of the popular connectivity options enterprise adopted over the year.

Choosing a Leased Line Service
With variable bandwidth speeds, leased lines have come a long way to what it is today. By using the leased lines enterprises accrued guaranteed bandwidth needed for voice, data and video. Enterprise favor leased lines for real-time data re-routing as they remained one of the best options for data transfer between the customer's locations without any packet loss.

Leased lines are available in several bandwidth options from 64K to STM speeds. They provide a private and secure connection between two or more locations in a customer's network, making them an ideal solution for connections that are time and content sensitive.

Whether a customer needs to transmit voice, data or video, leased lines provide a guaranteed bandwidth option for higher throughput and lower latency over a carrier network. Leased lines provide connectivity and data transfer between the customer's locations without any packet loss or jitter for error-free transmissions. Customers can also use leased lines to send multiple types of traffic over the same circuit.

Many leased line providers will offer a range of bandwidth options. If your bandwidth needs are likely to vary seasonally or suddenly increase, you may want to consider a flexible bandwidth solution.

It's really important to think about what happens to your bandwidth once your line reaches the POP. There is no point buying a fast connection between your office and your leased line provider, if the ongoing connections to the wider Internet are slow and busy.

Having identified a leased line provider with a POP in the right area, and suitable bandwidth provision, the next thing to look at is service availability guarantees. What is the average uptime for each of your leased line provider? What happens if the line goes down? If your ISP is monitoring your connection, they can detect and fix any problems, often before you are even aware they have arisen.

You may also want to ask about how your chosen leased line provider handles support. Some providers specialize in line-only provision, which is fine if you only need an extra line as backup, but you might want to choose a leased line provider with greater depth of experience if you are planning a substantial expansion of your network.

Tackling Migration to MPLS VPN
The leased line based multi protocol label switching (MPLS) VPN is the first preference for connecting to all critical sites like data centers. MPLS VPN, owing to its ability to offer frame relay at lower cost is anticipated to play the key market driving force. MPLS technology brings in the sophistication of a connection-oriented protocol to the connectionless IP world, enabling IP networks to support business grade applications.

This signifies the enterprises intention to acquire highly agile and redundant networks. What it means is the increased reliance on improving the quality of services and as a result enterprise explored various connectivity options and MPLS figured out prominently on their connectivity agenda.

While selecting MPLS, VPN services anticipate migration issues. The CIOs need to analyze strengths and weaknesses of TDM and Layer 2 WAN services and understand the primary business and technical issues when evaluating IP/MPLS VPN offerings.

Some of the key steps while deployment of MPLS VPN service is to properly describe the IP addressing, routing, load balancing, convergence, and services capabilities of the IP VPN. One must also develop enterprise quality of service (QoS) policies and implementation guidelines to achieve scalable support for multicast services.

Learn the benefits and drawbacks of various security and encryption mechanisms and ensure proper use of services and plan for future growth with monitoring and reporting services. It is also crucial to have a clear and concise set of steps to plan and execute a network migration.

However, migration comes with challenges. Enterprises must understand key migration issues, what the realistic benefits are, and how to optimize new services. Providers must know what aspects of their services give value to enterprises and how they can provide the best value to customers.  

In terms of benefits of MPLS based VPNs for enterprises, they enable right sourcing of WAN services and yield generous operational cost savings. For service providers, they offer a higher level of service to customers and lower costs for service deployment.

Manageability becomes easy and does not call for in-house technical work force. Rather than setting up and managing individual point-to-point circuits between each office using pair of leased lines, MPLS VPN customers need to provide only one connection from their office router to a service provider edge router. So in tune with market demands, operators ramped up their infrastructures.

However, MPLS VPN is not for everyone. Some organizations are dependent on pure IP and don't want an Ethernet solution. Others don't want routing information exposed to carriers. Therefore, most of them are going for IP VPN solution.