Azure Virtual WAN vs. SD-WAN Concierge

Azure Virtual WAN provides single functional interphase for routing, monitoring, connectivity and security operations. The connection of hubs in Azure virtual WAN makes it simple for us to use Microsoft as the pillar of our spoke connectivity. The platform provides us with robust connectivity features that allow for transitive connectivity across different spokes. However, you should always ensure you have understood your total cost of ownership to avoid potential price bombshells.

Incentivized

The underlying product (Velocloud) is not the issue, Windstream is. Anything this company touches turns to crap.

• It offers a seamless experience while connecting Virtual networks and Workloads via Azure Hub.
• Lot of connectivity options present - site to site VPN/Express route etc.
• Very easy connectivity and migration with on-premise sites and Azure Hub.

Incentivized

• Failover is easy, no single point of failure, provided you have the bandwidth.

• Integrations are limited within Azure. It is difficult to carry out multi-cloud integrations.
• If you haven't understood your monthly cost you can receive price shocks.

Incentivized

• While the product may work decently once implemented, Windstream is a constant roadblock.
• Trouble issues need to be escalated before people will bother to work on them.

As we were already using Azure as a cloud platform, it was easy setting up a Virtual WAN inside Azure as users/developers and DevOps engineers were familiar with the user interface and functioning as compared to going to some other portal for just the VWAN solution. The umbrella of features provided by Azure Virtual WAN made it the right choice for our infrastructure.

Incentivized

• Automatic troubleshooting solves incidents without costing our operational time.
• We are able unify all our operational activities.

Incentivized

• One outage on our main site cost over 500K in lost revenue for a day, Windstream was unapologetic for failing to set a QOS policy right during cutover.
• We needed to get a building re-wired to get the install at one location going. Windstream said, let us quote it... It took them 2 months to get us a quote that was 4x higher than a local provider. Thankfully, this didn't impact the deployment schedule.