I work for a systems integrator, and from time to time we have to prove the value of our solutions or proposals. Last time, I ran a quite “interesting” PoC. The customer planned to refresh their LAN/WAN infrastructure completely, introduce advanced network security capabilities, and manage everything through cloud-native management. At the beginning, my thoughts were, let us find out what we can do, and the results were quite unexpected, even for me.
Everything that is cloud-based or SaaS-based has some kind of limitations compared to on-prem solutions, so it is highly recommended to test it before making purchasing statements. Believe me, limitations sometimes are not obvious, like when we are not expecting that something so basic is not supported.
The PoC was based on two vendors, Vendor A for the WAN part, and Vendor B for the LAN part. I do not want to mention the vendors’ names here.
WAN part
SD-WAN, advanced network security features, everything in one box, managed through a cloud console. As always before a PoC, I did lab preparation, and everything worked like a charm, but the real PoC… Branch locations have firewalls with an LTE modem, and of course, SD-WAN has to be built using an LTE connection as well. And… Using the cloud console is not supported, yes, for such a basic thing. Using the cloud-based console, only ethernet interfaces are supported. So to make the PoC possible, I had to switch to on-prem management.
LAN part
The LAN part is even more interesting. Here, switches and wireless should be managed through a cloud console again, and network access control should be provided through a cloud-native tool as well. We have massive experience with Vendor B and their capabilities, but here, for the first time, I had to use everything cloud-based. Of course, it is supported as the vendor is claiming and has been available for purchase for about 3 months, so it is a quite new product. For the first time in my life, I faced such a case like here, where the product is ready to buy, but it is not working completely. It does not mean that something is not working or there is some bug. Here, the cloud management console sometimes works, the day after not, the next day part of the console works, then everything is working, and the day after, the whole added infrastructure was missing. For the first time in my career, I had to tell the customer that we had to switch to a different solution because this one is so useless and it is not even in a beta stage. Remember, it was a product ready to buy.
Just to quickly summarize, no matter which vendor it is about, they all have the same problem: development of new products is so fast, and fast deployments into the sales stage occur for products which are not ready. Remember about that if you plan to buy something relatively new; if the solution is cloud-based, test it prior to a decision, definitely.