EVP TM Wholesale, Amar Huzaimi Md Deris was invited to speak on APAC's Next Network Hub on September 9, 2022, at Equinix's Asia Peering Forum, representing TM alongside other APAC telco leaders from Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, and the Philippines.

In response to the discussion on Singapore's current space/power limitations and DC moratorium, among others, Amar emphasized how TM is prepared to attend to the global requirements for network and connectivity into APAC and ASEAN specifically, leveraging extensive infrastructure.

“Malaysia is already well-established within the global submarine cable network. For TM, which strives to be the nation’s preferred network infrastructure provider, we possesses 30 submarine cables with reachability and extensive regional coverage spanning over 320,000 kilometres, from Malaysia to Intra-ASEAN, to the Indian and Pacific Oceans. This is also in line with our aspiration to position Malaysia as a digital hub. Hence we believe that we are the ideal service provider upon whom you can trust to deliver reliable, diversified and uninterrupted global connectivity solutions.”

IP Transit services and internet exchanges (IX) are changing the way we communicate every day. They are opening up new opportunities for organisations to expand their reach, enhance customer experience, and increase profitability. Find out how IP Transit and IX are redefining business across the world. 

We are increasingly living in a connected world. The power of connectivity, brought about by the Internet, touches every fabric of our businesses and our lives so seamlessly that we no longer remember how the world existed so long without it. Today, it is the oxygen on which our economies, society, governance, and businesses run.

This became more evident when the COVID-19 pandemic hit us and brought the entire planet to a standstill.

But as they say, the show must go on. And, thanks to the Internet, it did.

It was, at a difficult time such as the pandemic, that we began to recognize the real significance of the Internet. Without the Internet, there would have been no semblance of business-as-usual. Without the Internet, work-from-home would have remained a distant dream. And without the Internet, businesses would have had to shut their doors and bid farewell to productivity, revenue, and profitability—even their existence.

But just the Internet was not going to cut it. Two forces came together to ensure businesses thrive in the new normal: IP Transit and Internet Exchanges (IX).

IP Transit is a service where an ISP allows traffic to pass through its network to reach the rest of the Internet—or its final destination. In order to access all Internet routes, businesses need to connect to all the autonomous systems out there. They need to avail the services of an ISP who has access to reach any network on the Internet.

At an Internet Exchange or IX, networks connect and exchange traffic, as the name suggests. It is a physical network access point through which primary network providers connect their networks and exchange traffic. The primary aim of an IX is to keep local Internet traffic within a confined area, improve the quality of service, and cut costs. Simply put, an IX offers a neutral local network where any carrier, ISP or network operator can connect and exchange traffic.

Let’s look at how IP Transit and IX empower businesses with a host of advantages.
 

The Benefits of IP Transit and Internet Exchanges

IP Transit and IX provide several and far-reaching benefits for businesses and wholesale companies.

With IP Transit, businesses like yours, can build an international digital footprint and establish a robust digital connection with customers, partners, and investors across the world. IP Transit services also enable global reachability, provide consistent digital experience, optimise network efficiency, enhance customer experience, and improve network performance.

They provide businesses with the ability to expand their service portfolio and reach new markets. They offer superior peering services that reduce the number of hops, enabling businesses with faster bandwidth.

Take for instance why minimising hops is crucial for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and telco carriers. Today, ISPs, and telco carriers are constantly thriving to meet the changing needs of businesses through extensive coverage, guaranteed performance and operational efficiency. IP Transit and IX  interconnect eyeball networks with minimal hops, provide access to an extensive number of direct connections and the global routing table.

IP Transit and IX, enable route optimisation and high-performance networking and empower businesses with the necessary throughput for critical business transactions. The availability, flexibility and scalability of IP Transit services and IX allow businesses to bring new applications to market quickly and cost-effectively.

Gateway to the World: IP Transit

TM Wholesale, offers IP Transit services with Clean Pipe, Direct Peering, single ASN, and Tier 1 capabilities. TM has the largest Internet subscriber base in Malaysia, and is one of the biggest regional ISPs. TM owns close to 30 submarine cables spanning over 300,000 km worldwide. It offers extensive global connectivity with other Tier 1 providers and direct peering with major content providers and OTTs. Recently, TM Wholesale added 2 new PoPs in East Malaysia.

What’s more? TM IP Transit delivers a complete carrier-class security portfolio and time-critical performance through a dedicated security monitoring portal. It also enables visibility and real-time performance reporting of IP Transit services with 24/7 customer support. It offers SLAs with KPIs of high quality, customer satisfaction, packet delivery, and IP port availability.

With TM IP Transit you can extend reachability with peering relationships with other global Tier-1 ISPs to ensure short-hop connectivity to global content. TM IP Transit is one of the biggest Regional Tier 1 ISPs in Asia.

Connecting Malaysia & ASEAN : TMiX

TMiX is the newest regional Internet exchange in Malaysia. It delivers unmatched performance and experience allowing businesses to grow and extend access to the Malaysian market and beyond, while ensuring the highest levels of customer experience and cost efficiency.

It is an open and neutral platform established to help Malaysia-based providers, international carriers, content providers, OTTs, and hyperscalers peer and physically connect to an IX point in Malaysia. TMiX ensures domestic traffic does not have to take indirect international routes, making it more cost-effective for users.

TMiX is designed as single Point of Interconnect (POI), via TM AS4788, to reach extensively into Malaysia. With a total strength of 62 nodes—TMiX ensures high-performing connectivity across Malaysia. It poses a significant cost benefit for smaller ISPs by reducing the dependency on costly international links. This translates into cost efficiency for TMiX customers.

Today, as more businesses like yours, gear up for digital transformation—to enhance customer experience, enable competitive differentiation and innovation, and achieve profitability by adopting new technologies—IP Transit and IX will play a significant role in breaking connectivity barriers and opening up a world of opportunities.

Collaboration signifies TM’s commitment to expand cloud gaming in the ASEAN region, leveraging Radian Arc’s Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) Edge Point of Presence

TM Wholesale, the domestic and international wholesale business arm of Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM), today announced a partnership with cloud infrastructure provider Radian Arc to expand its cloud gaming offerings in Malaysia and other ASEAN countries. 

The collaboration will see both parties leveraging each other’s strengths to provide users with high-quality content and cloud-gaming experiences.  

Through this partnership, both companies will collaborate to deploy a new point of presence (PoP) in Malaysia, utilising Radian Arc’s proprietary GPU Edge technology. This PoP will enhance TM Wholesale’s cloud-based gaming solutions as well as other real-time applications that use similar technology.  

The availability of this robust platform ensures that these central processing units (CPUs) can provide relevant applications at a lower cost to serve.

Following the rollout of the cloud gaming platform, TM Wholesale and Radian Arc intend to make an array of cloud-based applications, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IOT) accessible to users in order to accelerate digital transformation and adoption, which is pivotal to Malaysia's digital aspirations. 

Radian Arc is also partnering with cloud gaming platform Blacknut to bring their games catalogue to the region, reinforcing TM Wholesale’s vision of providing better cloud gaming solutions. Through this partnership, TM Wholesale will be able to offer over 500 family-friendly premium games to service providers, with lower latency and faster start times for their customers. 

Commenting on the collaboration, Amar Huzaimi Md Deris, Executive Vice President of TM Wholesale said, “TM Wholesale has always been committed to promoting Malaysia's transition to an advanced digital economy, and given the meteoric rise of cloud gaming, we’ve shifted gears to put this into a higher drive.

“Our collaboration with Radian Arc is among our efforts to fulfil the demands of the gaming industry, while exploring opportunities in other emerging technologies such as cloud and edge computing, and ensure customers enjoy high-quality digital experiences. 

“This is in line with our aspiration to position Malaysia as a regional digital hub and expand our reach via edge computing platforms to provide better user experience for next-generation applications and games,” he added. 

“As we continue to expand access to cloud gaming around the world, we want to find partners who can elevate our service offerings to telcos and improve the gaming experiences we provide to players,” said David Cook, CEO of Radian Arc. “The collaboration will also look into possibilities for future applications leveraging TM’s extensive network coverage, allowing us and Blacknut to improve the quality of cloud gaming for customers in Malaysia and the surrounding regions.”

The collaboration with Radian Arc symbolizes a new era of gaming for TM, harnessing the benefits of GPU Edge technology to deliver high-quality digital experiences to end users.
 

TM Wholesale returned to Atlanta for International Telecoms Week 2022 (ITW), led by Executive Vice President Amar Huzaimi Md Deris.
 
During the event, which took place from May 9 to May 12, 2022, TM Wholesale promoted key products such as TM Edge Services, Data solutions including IP Transit, and Global SD-WAN via a virtual exhibition booth in addition to having dedicated physical meeting rooms to discuss voice and connectivity solutions with customers.
 
Taking advantage of ITW as one of the world's largest gatherings of communications executives from all sectors of the global communications industry, TM delegates, comprised of TM Wholesale's management, products, and sales team, as well as the team from TM's regional office in the United States, have the opportunity to engage with carriers and operators from new markets.
 

TM Wholesale attended AsiaTech x Singapore 2022 for CommunicAsia and BroadcastAsia from June 1 to 3, 2022, to meet with the APAC media community and discuss the recent trends in the  broadcast industry, content, production, as well as eSport, gaming and investments.

TM Wholesale delegates led by EVP Amar Huzaimi Md Deris and TM regional office in Singapore were able to attract a crowd to the booth set up to promote TM Wholesale’s edge services that includes CDN and gaming solutions.   

SD WAN is taking the enterprise by storm. Read on to find the easiest explanation of what SD WAN is, the challenges it solves, and discover the speed and intensity of its growth.

Driven largely by increased digitalisation and raised by the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) wave, SD WAN has garnered a lot of attention in the last few quarters. This is an excellent trend because the technology solves a lot of critical problems organisations face, especially for fast-growing, global companies.

Unfortunately, there is still plenty of mystery around the technology. Despite gaining popularity in 2014 (the technology has been around since 2000), there’s a sizeable pocket of business, and technology leaders and practitioners who are less-than-comfortable articulating its definition, and its benefits to the enterprise.

In fact, a lack of knowledge is the second biggest barrier to SD WAN adoption, according to The Global State of the WAN Report, with 33% of organisations reporting it as a challenge. Another 30% say the “technology’s newness” is a hurdle to adoption.

                                                                                                                                    Source: The Global State of the WAN Report

It is time to clear up these doubts!

Read on and by the end, you will be able to describe what SD WAN is, explain it to your colleagues, list out its key benefits, demonstrate why—and how much—it is being adopted.

SD WAN: The Simplest Explanation You Will Find Anywhere

Imagine you oversee the travel desk for your office. Everyone depends on you to get them from your office in Kuala Lumpur (KL), Malaysia to a regional office in Bangkok, Thailand. There are a couple of ways to move people:

● By air (planes)

● By sea (ship)

● By rail

● Or by road

In the SD WAN world, these are called the transport layer, or the underlay (remember those words, we will come back to them). It is the medium on which data travels.

It is important for you to move people cost-effectively, safely, and reliably. To do so you must choose the most optimal route and transport medium based on different types of employees.

Network engineers have a similar challenge. Not all traffic on a wide area network (WAN) is equal. For example, some mission-critical systems require high uptime, while Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) traffic requires a high level of service quality. Network leaders must decide which is the best transport layer to use, based on traffic type, to have the highest cost-effectiveness, security, and performance, for different types of traffic.

Network operations teams also have to move data between more points—not just between KL and Bangkok. On a WAN, they are steering traffic between hundreds of points, using multiple types of transport layers. To do so effectively, they use rules or policies.

But rules need to be changed flexibly because of the exigencies of the real world: Some traffic suddenly needs to prioritised, or a transport layer goes down, for example.

So, network operators need to be agile. This is where SD WANs come in. With SD WAN technology, they can use software to centrally control routers and other equipment which helps them steer traffic, centrally, sitting in one place.

How is this possible? SD WAN introduces a software layer, called the overlay, on top of the underlay. The overlay enables network teams to manage WANs using a central, software-based orchestrator—eliminating the need to provision or program each network device separately (which is why you might have heard of the concept of zero-provisioning.) The overlay and orchestrator are where the idea of abstraction comes in: Network teams are abstracted from the worries of managing the physical elements of a network.

Now from a central location, using a software console, network teams can set up policies that shunt traffic easily, immaterial of the transport layer, which is what the term transport-agnostic means. SD WANs are also application-aware, i.e., they can recognise different types of traffic and prioritise one over the other, intelligently.

The Goodness of SD WAN

As you can tell, there are a ton of benefits from using an SD WAN—especially when you compare them to the more rigid, more expensive Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) technology that dominates WAN architectures. Implemented correctly, SD WAN offers greater visibility, agility, security, performance, and intelligence than MPLS. Additionally, MPLS is less-suited for the dynamic traffic patterns that arise with the adoption of cloud services. While there is research proving that SD WANs are being adopted at the cost of MPLS, many large enterprises leverage SD WAN to augment existing MPLS set-ups.

SD WAN’s agility and efficiency benefits really begin to multiply when you run a complex, global business that must stitch together hundreds of offices, warehouses, outlets, factories, data centers, and cloud platforms—across many countries. Especially when each country or region offers different types of connectivity, at different price points, at different levels of reliability and security.

Take, for example, a large conglomerate headquartered in Singapore but with regional offices in all the capitals of Asia and Europe, factories in Malaysia and Germany, and retail outlets that run in the hundreds. Introducing new nodes or applying network and security policies—granularly—across such a vast network is arduous, without the automation and the central orchestration that SD WAN makes possible. Transporting data quickly and reliably over long distances, too, is a challenge without the dependability SD WAN offers combined with sturdy connectivity backbone.

It is important to note that not all SD WAN solutions are built equal. For Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM), the SD WAN offering that is provided by its global and wholesale business arm, TM WHOLESALE, for example, is especially useful for enterprises with a widespread, multi-geo footprint thanks to its global connectivity. The service offers extensive coverage (over 190 countries!), supports various network topologies (hub-spoke, full mesh, partial mesh), and deployment models (do-it-yourself, co-managed, and fully managed.)

Plus, TM WHOLESALE overlays additional services—including an enhanced security suite which includes firewalls, Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), URL-filtering and cloud security, among others—and advanced analytics that uncovers insights to improve SD WAN management and network outcomes.

SD WANs, in general, result in better application performance, improved cost control, enhanced flexibility and security, and greater resilience, among several other benefits. (More on this in a future article, 13 Reasons Why: Your Business Needs to Invest in SD WAN. CTA: Inform Me When It’s Out clicking opens mailbox, pre-populated with sales email to start conversation)

This explains the impressive growth of the SD WAN market. Analyst firm, Futuriom, predicts the SD-WAN market will grow at 34% CAGR and touch $4.6 billion by 2023. An IDC pegged

SD WAN’s market size even higher—at $5.25 billion by 2023. And according to the market research firm, Dell’Oro Group, in the first two quarters of 2021, the global SD-WAN market grew 39% over to the last year.

If you have not started on your SD WAN journey, it is critical to start now. Organisations that delay compound the risk of being left behind in an increasingly digital, cloud-first world. The first step is to create a strategy. If that seems like a big ask, do not worry. TM WHOLESALE has professional services experts who will hold your hand every step of the way, starting with an assessment of your needs based on your unique business environment, and then consult and design an SD WAN architecture tailored to your business.

A deep-dive into the reasons organisations, such as yours, are adopting SD-WAN, and the benefits they are witnessing.

If you were asked to name the fastest-growing technologies today, it is likely your answers would include artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), analytics and blockchain-enabled decentralised finance (De-Fi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Not a lot of people would put software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN) in this category. But that would be unfair.

IDC forecasts that the SD-WAN market will grow 18.9% a year until 2025, making it among the fastest-growing segments of the network market. This growth is driven by incredible adoption rates. According to the 2021 State of SD-WAN Study, “SD-WAN adoption is expected to rise to 92% of companies and 64% of enterprise locations by 2026 with most adopting it for efficiency (38%), cost savings (38%), and agility (34%).”

A Deeper Look at What Is Driving SD-WAN

A confluence of forces—some driven by nature, others by human stakeholders—has produced an SD-WAN tipping point. As an increasing number of enterprises adopt the technology, several industry-watchers have begun to ask whether, in the near future, organisations will even refer to the term SD-WAN, or just merely ‘networks’.

This perfect storm of trends—including real-time applications powered by the trio of 5G, IoT and edge computing; and the need for greater operational resilience driven by uncertain environments and natural disasters—highlight the need for more agile networks. Among the drivers of SD-WAN, there are two stand out: More distributed computing landscapes, and the rise of hybrid workplaces.

“Enterprise applications are more distributed than ever, and now because of COVID-19, the users accessing those applications are more distributed too. As organisations look to support a hybrid workforce and cloud-native network architectures, SD-WAN infrastructure has become a critically important technology for enabling flexible, agile, and optimised connectivity," says Ajeet Das, Research Director, IDC.

Hybrid office configurations are placing a significant amount of pressure on enterprise networks. TeleGeography’s WAN Manager Survey shows that 85% of organisations had the majority of their workforce working remote; with the 80%-20% configuration (80% remote/20% at job sites) being the most popular.

When they looked deeper into the network challenges that these companies faced, the results underscored the need for better network management. (Responses were graded on a scale of 1-5, with 5 representing very challenging).

                                                                                                                       Source: WAN Manager Survey

Greater adoption of the cloud, too, is pushing organisations to adopt more agile networking strategies such as SD-WAN. In a pre-multi-cloud world, enterprise network operations (NetOps) teams would backhaul traffic from remote locations to data centres. This enabled security operations (SecOps), among other aims, to execute security checks on traffic.

But as more applications reside in the cloud than ever, this strategy introduces congestion, delays, and increased costs. Plus, cloud strategies introduce more dynamism than static traditional network architectures can support—making the network a chokepoint for digital transformation. Virtual machines and containers, for example, can be scaled up, but most networks are not this flexible.

The use of cloud solutions and cloud-native tools is just one facet of digital transformation. As enterprises digitalise every aspect of their business from communication to processes, more data flows are going in more directions. All this activity creates intense pressure on wide area networks (WANs).

Modern enterprises require higher levels of application performance and more simplified management to handle more dynamic, more mixed, and more complex networks. With traditional WANs, the burden on network teams (with operational tasks including provisioning, configuring, monitoring and managing) become untenable, introducing high overhead costs, errors, delays, and poor responsiveness.

Additionally, dedicated, private circuits—a default for many large enterprises—are expensive, have long gestation periods, and require more time and more skills to manage. The complexity problem increases exponentially for global companies, which must address the needs of a large number of geographically-dispersed edge locations, many with limited connectivity options, and constrained by the cost and service variables of region-specific connectivity offerings.

The hard reality is that existing WANs are not geared up to take on the needs of digitally transforming organisations.

The Upside of SD-WAN

SD-WANs can help enterprises solve these challenges. SD-WANs introduce multiple network benefits that span across functions, and dimensions.

For NetOps teams, SD-WAN can improve network sizing. Typically, to ensure that networks are well-provided for, network teams will build in redundancy, such as additional bandwidth. Over time, it becomes difficult to assess whether there is a glut of bandwidth. SD-WAN brings more visibility to the network, which allows network teams to better gauge utilisation and requirements, enabling them to trim provisioning. This increased visibility, and the ability to monitor the WAN enables networks teams stay on top of cost, application performance, and congestion levels, among network health indicators.

Plus, because SD-WAN technology allows networks to use back-up transport layers, instead of activating them only in emergencies, organisations get more value from their network assets, which makes it easier for network leaders to defend purchase decisions.

Lower costs are a significant motivator of adopting SD-WAN. According to the State of the Network 2020, it is the top reason enterprises are embracing SD-WAN, say 58% of respondents.

                                                                                                                                          Source: State of the Network 2020

One of the ways, SD-WANs shrink cost is by enabling different data types (mission-critical vs less-mission critical, for example) to be routed on the most cost-effective underlay. Business applications, which require high quality of service (QoS) and security, for instance, can be

prioritised and delivered using more expensive private circuits, while less critical application data can be routed through more cost-effective public Internet paths. This ability to “prioritise business critical traffic” is also an important benefit of SD-WAN, say 46% of network professionals, points out IDG Research.

Then, there is the resiliency argument. SD-WAN virtualises the network with an overlay which allows network executives to cope more easily with drastic changes—like the COVID-19 pandemic, for example—when network traffic shifts. During the pandemic more applications, and traffic, quickly moved to the cloud. SD-WANs also make it easier and more effective to create failover paths, so that when a primary link is disrupted, data flows switch to another route or transport layer, with insignificant impact on users.

SD-WANs create more choice for network teams. With SD-WANs, network engineers can choose from a greater variety of transport layers, mixing and matching, and creating policy-based priorities for data mediums based on specific QoS, security or cost requirements. SD-WANs allow network managers to add nodes to the network more quickly, allowing them to stay aligned with dynamic and unpredictable business needs. SD-WANs also avoid many of the errors that manually configuring traditional WANs can introduce.

With its ability to centrally orchestrate a network, SD-WANs lower the burden on network teams, increasing their productivity and cost-effectiveness, and ensuring that network policies can be pushed centrally or replicated among edge nodes, which in turn strengthens an organisation’s security posture.

For the business, SD-WAN benefits appear as improvements to application performance, thanks to its ability to adaptatively segment and re-route traffic intelligently. SD-WAN makes it easier to extend the enterprise to the cloud, and the multiple benefits of the cloud. From a profitability point of view, it lowers the cost overheads associated with managing complex networks, such as people and bandwidth. SD-WANs also result in greater business confidence from less downtime, and more agility.

TM WHOLESALE: Supercharging Networks

The more complex and dispersed an enterprise is, the more benefits discussed here apply. For global organisations shifting from more traditional network architectures to SD-WAN, it is important to weigh the costs of an SD-WAN implementation against its benefits. TM WHOLESALE—the global and wholesale business arm of Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM)—can help assess what SD-WAN can achieve, creating a benefits-based business case.

TM WHOLESALE can also help guide enterprises across the SD-WAN lifecycle from professional services to consult and design a network customised to your business; to fully-managed services that includes sourcing and delivery, proactive monitoring, a 24x7 contact centre and local field support.

TM WHOLESALE offers a host of connectivity types including broadband Internet, dedicated Internet access (DIA), mobile LTE, IPVPN, satellite, and global private meshed backbone. Additionally, it has a BYOC (Bring Your Own Connectivity) option.

To help accelerate adoption, TM WHOLESALE offers Global SD-WAN packages in three flavours: SD-Lite, a cost-effective, Internet-based solution; SD-Pro for businesses which require a mix of private and public links to support both mission-critical and non-core applications; and SD-Flex, an a-la-carte option that for enterprises that need the flexibility of working with existing connectivity contracts.

With TM WHOLESALE, organisations can also add on security services to inspect data, and have access to an analytics portal which offers NetOps teams granular visibility of network health.

Start your network transformation journey with TM WHOLESALE today!

If your organisation is among the hundreds planning to leverage SD-WAN, you have come to the right place. Learn how to spot SD-WAN-washing, the different models to adopt SD-WAN, and what to look out for in a prospective SD-WAN managed service provider.

In 2020, 43% of businesses globally said they installed software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN) on part of their network.

What is wrong with this number?

Nothing.

Except that it does not offer the full picture.

In 2018, only 18%, less than half, said they used SD-WAN on their network. And by 2026, SD-WAN adoption is expected to cover 92% of companies—double the 2020 figure.

Now you really get a sense of the momentum with which SD-WAN is being adopted.

And it is a phenomenon that is crossing industry lines. Look at how different industries are taking to SD-WAN.

 

Sectors Reporting Increased Adoption of SD-WAN

Construction/Engineering	56%
Retail/E-Commerce	49%
Consulting/Business Services	49%
Healthcare/Medical	47%
High Tech	46%
Manufacturing	43%
Financial Services	43%
Legal	33%

                                                                                                                    Source: State of Disruption 2021

 

If your organisation is one of the many planning on adopting SD-WAN, here are a few pointers to help you along your way.

 

Watch Out for SD-WAN Washing

 

The meteoric rise of SD-WAN has resulted in many technology providers making inaccurate claims that their offerings include SD-WAN. To be clear, to be part of the SD-WAN club, a product/service must have these characteristics:

Virtualised Control: The ability to separate the control plane from the data plane and create an overlay that can flexibly command underlying physical network infrastructure.

Centralised Management Using Policy: The ability to create policies centrally and implement them on all appropriate SD-WAN devices for greater consistency and efficiency.

Orchestrate Centrally: The ability to optimise network performance centrally, and route traffic over the best physical connection, based on cost, experience and security.

Zero-touch Provisioning: The ability to configure and provision edge devices remotely, shrinking the amount of time and errors that result from manual interventions.

TM’s Global SD-WAN offering addresses all four criteria, enabling it to meet the needs of customers completely.

 

Choose the Best Deployment Option

There are three ways to deploy an SD-WAN: DIY (Do-it-Yourself), Co-Managed, and Fully-Managed.

As the name implies, in a DIY model, internal IT and networking resources take full responsibility for provisioning, managing, optimising, and troubleshooting an SD-WAN implementation. While some organisations opt for this strategy, it is not the most popular, and is typically seen among organisations opting for simpler hub-and-spoke architectures, versus more complex full mesh topologies. Another option the co-managed model, in which both internal teams, and staffers from a managed provider, share the job of running an SD-WAN,

Managed SD-WAN deployments are more common. According to a survey by consulting firm, Altman Solon, “only 23% use a do-it-yourself solution and 77% use a fully managed or co-managed solution. Moreover, 48% of those using a co-managed service expect to offload more of their IT work to their partners.”

What is behind this preference? Primarily, the complexities of standing up and operating an SD-WAN. A full 76% of enterprises surveyed by Altman Solon say their networks have become more complex and that they do not have the internal skills to manage them.

Some challenges include assessing the readiness of on-premises networking equipment, figuring out how breakout traffic from the branch to the Internet will be secured, and diving deep into quality-of-service settings to maximise traffic shaping and path control capabilities, for instance.

In a deployment where a managed service provider (MSP) has full ownership, all these challenges, and more, are outsourced.

TM WHOLESALE—the global and wholesale business arm of Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM)—has a fully-managed service, for example, which takes care of an SD-WAN deployment from end-to-end, across its lifecycle. TM WHOLESALE has the professional services to consult and design a network and experts to source, deliver, monitor, and optimise an SD-WAN, complete with a 24x7 contact centre and local field support. It can also streamline the process of ensuring local Internet breakout traffic is secured.

Managed service providers have the best practices to accelerate the time-to-value of a SD-WAN initiative, and are better placed to solve unique, company-specific challenges

 

Key Criteria in Selecting an SD-WAN MSP

It can be hard for enterprise decision-makers to decide who to partner with, given how critical SD-WAN success is to an organisation’s digital transformation agenda, and the mushrooming number of providers.

Using some of the pointers outlined here, it is easier to separate the wheat from the chaff—the real SD-WAN providers, from the SD-WAN imposters.

Shortening this short-list is tricker and depends on the specific needs of your organisation. But there are some thumb-rules that can help weed out technology providers not aligned to your needs.

Look for providers that:

Offer great security. As security and networking increasingly merge, and more enterprises aim to adopt SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) principles, the ability of an SD-WAN to integrate security is ever more important.

Providers such as TM WHOLESALE, for instance, embed security features into its SD-WAN offering. TM WHOLESALE’s enhanced security suite includes firewalls, intrusion prevention system (IPS), URL-filtering and cloud security, among others.

According to the State of SD-WAN whitepaper from Altman Solon, security; and reliability and performance are the top key purchase criteria for SD-WAN managed services.

 

                                                                                                                                 Source: State of SD-WAN

 

                                       Here are some of the security features enterprises are looking for, ranked in order of importance.

                                                                                                            Source: 2021 SD-WAN Managed Services Survey

 

Have service portals: Customer portals and analytics are critical components of a co-managed model. They allow network teams to monitor their networks, tweak controls, adjust configurations, and extract insights from analytics to optimise performance or head-off potential challenges.

TM WHOLESALE offers SD-WAN dashboards and advanced analytics which allow you to monitor the overall health of your SD-WAN network, as well as view statistics and reports related to SD-WAN features.

According to Futuriom, 78% of network teams say, “co-management and self-service customer portals are key features of an SD-WAN managed services offering.” The report also adds: “This is an area where SD-WAN MS (managed service) will be quickly differentiated. The capability to offer dynamic customer portals and management interfaces complete with analytics will be key to winning SD-WAN services.”

Are Cloud Ready: More enterprise workloads are being migrated to hybrid and multi-cloud environments and it is essential that SD-WAN managed service providers can ease this transition.

In fact, Futuriom’s survey points out that it is the second most important feature enterprise buyers are studying when deciding on an SD-WAN partner.

 

The Most Important Features in an SD-WAN Managed Service Offering

 

 

With TM WHOLESALE, this is not a challenge. Organisations can leverage TM WHOLESALE’s global private network and Cloud-on-Ramp capabilities for improved network performance, especially of SaaS services such as Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce.

Double-clicking on each of these capabilities will give you a sense of the granularity that a service provides—an important factor in decision making. For example, do all the points of presence (PoPs) a service provider offers have the same capabilities? Sometimes not all the PoPs on an impressive map will have the same security capabilities.

Remember, not all SD-WAN offerings are equal. TM’s Global SD-WAN, for example, offer extensive coverage—over 190 countries—and support various network topologies, including hub-spoke, full mesh, partial mesh. TM WHOLESALE can also offer a range of connectivity types—ranging from 1 Mbps to 10Gbps—including broadband Internet, dedicated Internet access (DIA), mobile LTE, IPVPN, satellite, and global private meshed backbone. Additionally, it has a BYOC (Bring Your Own Connectivity) option.

Internet Protocol (IP) Transit services optimise network efficiency, enable global reachability, provide consistent digital experience, improve network performance, and enhance customer experience. But what really is IP Transit, how does it work, and why do organisations like yours need it? Here’s a deep dive into IP Transit and why it is essential for digital transformation.

What would it take to connect all of humanity, 7.9 billion of us, to the Internet in 10 years?

The good people at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) have an answer. Or two.

US$428 billion and, to some extent, IP Transit.

At its most basic level, the thread that runs through the Internet, the one that is often relegated to the background, but is critical for the functioning of a modern, connected world—and your business—is, among other things, IP Transit.

Without IP Transit, organisations, and the world at large, would have been operating in a fragmented, disconnected, and isolated environment. It is the power of IP Transit that has been instrumental in creating a borderless world.

There are multiple benefits of an IP Transit service. It optimises network efficiency and improves network performance. It enables organisations to expand customer base by providing global reachability and increase eyeballs. It also provides consistent digital experience with uninterrupted access, thereby enhancing customer experience.

Within your organisations, cloud-based services, and new and emerging technologies are constantly reshaping your businesses, enabling digital transformation. Moreover, in the near future, enterprises will have to adopt 5G and edge computing.

And these technologies will require fast, reliable, and secure connectivity, which in part, will be powered by IP Transit.

But what is IP Transit, how does it work, and why do you need it? A deep dive into IP Transit will help organisations like yours understand how your business accesses the Internet and how your customers connect with your services, enabling you to better customer experience, optimise network efficiency, improve performance, and save costs.

Demystifying IP Transit

IP Transit is a service where an internet Service Provider (ISP) allows traffic to pass through its network to reach the rest of the Internet—or its final destination. In order to access all Internet routes, enterprises need to connect to all the autonomous systems (more on this later) out there. They can’t do this alone. They need to avail the services of an ISP who has access to reach any network on the Internet.

Simply put, any time you want to send or receive information across the Internet, you need to ‘go through’ single or multiple third-party networks. IP Transit makes this possible.

The quality of IP Transit, that is speed, consistent digital experience, global reachability, and optimum service performance also depend on the ISPs ‘Tier status’. As ISPs are classified into a 3-tier model that categorizes them based on the type of Internet services they provide, it is critical for organisations to partner with Tier 1 ISP that has global and regional reachability.

That is because global and regional ISPs open up the world of global Internet connectivity. A Tier 1 ISP has access to the entire Internet solely through its free and reciprocal peering agreements. It doesn’t pay transit fees to anyone and can reach anywhere on the internet quickly and cost-effectively.

But before we go any further, we will have to get a little technical to understand what an Autonomous System is that makes up the entire Internet.

The Role of Autonomous Systems

As mentioned earlier, an Autonomous System (AS) plays a major role in the functioning of IP Transit. The system can ‘autonomously’—without depending on a third-party—decide who to exchange traffic with on the Internet.

An AS represents a set of IP routing prefixes that belong to a network and are managed by one or more network operators on behalf of a single entity or domain. Essentially, each AS is given a unique number, called an Autonomous System Number (ASN). What this means is when an organisation owns an ASN, it can use that to establish a single gateway point to the Internet.

You might be wondering how AS communicates route information and steer traffic between each other. Enter BGP or Border Gateway Protocol. BGP practically runs the Internet. When networks interact with each other, they need a mode of transport, a ‘gateway’ to communicate, to send and receive a message. BGP makes that possible.

There are two types of interconnection mechanisms that allow AS, that is equivalent to the Internet network to connect directly and indirectly over the Internet: Peering and Transit.

In the networking space, organisations seem to use these words interchangeably. When, in fact, they are different. Let’s find out how.

For starters, both IP Transit and Peering are modes of connection between different network entities.

In IP Transit, one entity pays another for the ‘right to transit’ its upstream network. That makes one entity higher than the other as both parties do not benefit equally from the exchange.

Protecting Against DDoS Attacks

While the Internet is a gateway to new opportunities, it is also a breeding ground for cyberthreats like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks have the power to bring down not just individuals or organisations but an entire country. DDoS attacks overload servers or disrupt network services by overwhelming them with access requests.

For instance, the infamous Mirai and Mirai Dyn attacks rendered the entire country of Liberia offline in 2016, and threatened to bring down the Internet infrastructure of the United States. Apart from these, there have been several attacks on large cloud providers such as AWS and Google in 2020. Here’s a list. There’s no wonder then that, according to a Cisco study, the total number of DDoS attacks will double from 7.9 million in 2018 to over 15 million by 2023. These attacks lead to downtime, increased bandwidth costs, and lost customers, which eventually lead to severe financial losses. That’s why, it is crucial for ISPs, telecom companies, and enterprises—that want to leverage IP Transit—to ensure they prevent their network from DDoS attacks. Choosing an IP Transit provider that has expertise in preventing these attacks with Clean Pipe services (more on this in our subsequent blogs) is imperative.

About TM WHOLESALE

Leading Malaysian telecom service provider, such as TM WHOLESALE, offer IP Transit services via AS4788 with regional upstream, direct peering, content localization capabilities and valued added services such as Clean Pipe and Selective Routing features. TM WHOLESALE has the largest Internet subscriber base in Malaysia, and is one of the biggest regional ISPs in Asia. TM owns close to 30 submarine cables spanning over 300,000 km worldwide. It offers extensive global reachability and direct connectivity to the Internet.

In our subsequent blogs, you’ll learn how IP Transit and TM WHOLESALE’s services merge to create new possibilities for your business not just today but also for a future that depends on digital transformation.

IP Transit service is your gateway to the Internet and a host of new opportunities to expand your business, gain new customers, and increase profitability. The success of your IP Transit strategy depends on which provider you choose to consider for IP Transit services. Here are five traits you should look for in your IP Transit provider before investing in them.

IP Transit services enable organisations, ISPs and telecom companies to reach the wider Internet and provide faster, better, and uninterrupted access.

But in order to ensure that, you need to partner with an IP Transit provider who has robust offerings, a secure IP Transit gateway, interconnections with other Tier 1 providers, extensive reachability, and reliable support that is able to scale with your company’s needs and growth.

Here are five traits that you must look for in your IP Transit provider before investing in their services.

1. Global and Regional Reachability

Tier 1 ISPs are in the driver’s seat of global and regional Internet connectivity. A Tier 1 network can reach every other network on the Internet with its own infrastructure.

This allows organisations to handle traffic at high volumes, with a stable performance level, irrespective of connecting between two states or two continents. Tier 1 providers are usually large ISPs that can offer robust networking power at affordable and competitive prices.

The TM WHOLESALE Advantage: TM WHOLESALE, one of biggest regional service providers in Asia, offers extensive reachability and connectivity to ensure optimum service performance.

2. Extensive Points of Presence

Points of Presence (POPs) is where two or more networks or communication devices share a connection.

Partner with a provider who has extensive PoPs and wide reachability. This enables low latency between regions.

The more number of PoPs a provider has, the more resilient and redundant your connectivity becomes. This also ensures you take advantage of multiple protection paths and diverse routing options.

The TM WHOLESALE Advantage: TM WHOLESALE’s core IP backbone network spans 28 major cities around the world. It has over 6Tbps of global IP backbone and peering capacities which is diversely routed on different submarine fibre cables and focused on providing connectivity within and to/from Asia.

3. Owns a Single ASN

Autonomous System Number (ASN) is a globally unique number that defines the path to the owner’s network.

You need one ASN for global operations. Most of the big global networks operate a single-AS strategy.

Partnering with a provider who has a single ASN enables you to get a direct interconnect with Amazon AWS, or the Microsoft Azure Peering Service (MAPS), or other cloud platforms.

Providers with single ASN have the freedom to control performance settings between two paths and decide which route is faster to reach target networks. This leads to full independence, redundancy, and allows them to choose the upstream most suitable for their—and in turn, yours—own setup.

The TM WHOLESALE Advantage: TM IP Transit service is specifically designed to provide a very high performance of global and regional connectivity through a single ASN (AS4788). TM single ASN4788 network enables global reachability and regional connectivity. AS4788 network reaches more destinations and ensures short hop connectivity.

4. Enables Robust Security with Clean Pipe

The public internet is prone to DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. In fact, worldwide, DDoS attacks are among the top 10 cyber threats.

Clean Pipe is specifically designed to detect DDoS attacks. Clean Pipe defends against volumetric attack and application-layer attacks. On-premise network security, on the other hand, only handles threats once they have reached your network. Clean Pipe detects and prevents them before they reach the network.

For businesses handling sensitive data, Clean Pipe enables DDoS protection and also protects transactions and applications.

The TM WHOLESALE Advantage: TM WHOLESALE provides Value Added Services with its IP Transit that includes Clean Pipe.

5. Provides Direct Peering

When providers partner with other ISPs and directly connect to their networks, they reduce the number of steps or hops they need to reach their final destination.

Direct peering is an interconnection of two separate networks to exchange traffic directly. Essentially, your company’s provider, let’s call this network A, connects directly to another CDN or ISP, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud, network B. Once Network A and B are connected, these two networks communicate directly with one another.

As the name suggests, Direct Peering connections bypass the public Internet to provide direct access to CDNs and ISPs, reducing latency and improving overall network

performance. It ensures your Internet connectivity doesn’t get disrupted despite the usage of popular applications.

The TM WHOLESALE Advantage: TM WHOLESALE provides direct peering services with major Internet backbones and content providers.

TM WHOLESALE is a leading Malaysian telecom service provider that offers IP Transit services via AS4788 with regional upstream, direct peering, content localisation and Tier 1 capabilities and valued added services such as Clean Pipe and Selective Routing features.

TM WHOLESALE has the largest Internet subscriber base in Malaysia, and is one of the biggest regional ISPs in Asia. TM owns close to 30 submarine cables spanning 300,000 km worldwide. It offers extensive global reachability and direct connectivity to the Internet.

That’s why organisations that want a fast, reliable, and secure IP Transit connection should consider partnering with TM WHOLESALE and benefit from its extensive reachability, secure services, and more.