By Brian Bowman, Senior Solutions Architect
Struggling with latency, congestion, or compliance issues? Discover when it’s time to move from public internet to private connectivity.
Network operations have never demanded more than they do now, leading many network managers to question whether the public internet is enough.
While many organizations begin their network journey with VPNs over the public internet, they often bump into limitations quickly and begin exploring the natural next step – private connectivity. According to STL Partners, “the total private networks addressable market will grow from USD1 billion in 2024 to USD21 billion in 2030.”
In this blog, we walk through when public methods begin to fail, when private connectivity becomes essential, and how to know when it’s time to make the switch.
Almost all organizations start with internet-based VPNs to connect to their early-stage cloud infrastructure.
Let’s be clear – there’s nothing inherently wrong with using VPN tunnels to connect to your cloud and SaaS providers. They’re a quick way to implement a cloud-based solution without having to make a long-term commitment to new network services or infrastructure.
But the public internet will eventually fall short for your organization if:
This is because when you use a shared connection like the public internet, you risk the following:
Delays in how long it takes data to travel can disrupt real-time applications and be felt by your customers. Even small spikes in latency can impact the reliability of critical services.
When packets drop, the consequences can be more serious than just frozen screens or incomplete data transfers. If you’re moving sensitive files or running workloads that demand accuracy, packet loss could stall your operations entirely.
In times of peak traffic, bandwidth becomes impaired and connections can grow sluggish. You can’t control who else is using the same paths, making performance unpredictable in moments you need it most.
You can’t make quick adjustments to your connectivity setup to suit your organization’s needs. If you need more bandwidth, lower latency, or stronger resilience, the public internet doesn’t give you dials to turn – you’re stuck with what you can get.
Most modern workloads require high throughput and low latency, and this is only becoming more true. When you provision private paths to your cloud workloads, you control your network specs, not to mention getting the paths all to yourself.
Unlike the public internet, private connectivity delivers:
The public internet works well for Software as a Service (SaaS) apps that are designed to be publicly accessed globally – for example, Microsoft 365. These solutions are designed to automatically route users to their closest resources for local access on a global scale.
If you’re only running low-bandwidth or non-critical applications that don’t need guaranteed performance, private connectivity may also not be necessary for you.
It’s time to consider going private if your network team is noticing any of the following:
Certain applications have become critical to your business operations or customer base. If you run a streaming service people can’t watch or a banking application people can’t pay on, you cripple your business. These applications may even run well across the public internet, but because of its inconsistent nature, you’ll get unexpected performance issues like latency and jitter when it can make or break operations. This mode of transmission is too risky for critical operations.
Throughput requirements are outgrowing supported VPN speeds. If you’re operating big data workloads or experimenting with AI integration, this can happen quickly as throughput requirements inflate.
You’re struggling to meet different compliance and security requirements. Private connectivity puts control back into the user’s hands to apply leading security policies and protections.
Your egress fees are ballooning. If you’re moving large volumes of traffic, provisioning private connectivity can reduce overall costs in the short-term and make them easier to manage in the long-term.
If you’re unsure of whether to make the move from public to private, ask yourself:
If the answer to any of the above is yes, it’s already time to go private.
As businesses move more workloads to the cloud or diversify their workloads in a hybrid architecture, private networking becomes more and more important.
A hybrid network approach is also an option you might want to consider. You can use the internet to connect from the edge, then jump on to a private connection from the middle mile to the cloud.
This approach helps solve for locations that are difficult to reach with a private network, and is much faster than going with a traditional private connectivity provider as you won’t have to wait for network build-outs.
Private connectivity doesn’t just improve your network performance – it allows you to manage your traffic and costs in new ways. To get the most value out of your private network, design with both efficiency and flexibility in mind.
If you deploy with a well-established Network as a Service (NaaS) provider like Megaport, you can ditch traditional private connectivity providers, turning up connections on demand and even extending private connectivity to the edge in just a few clicks to optimize your entire network.
Plenty of organizations wait until they have a critical issue before considering private networking. But setting up private connectivity is far quicker and easier than it used to be – a NaaS solution like Megaport can be turned up in minutes.
When in doubt, it’s always best to plan.
Private connectivity doesn’t have to mean long contracts or complex builds. With Megaport, you can spin up secure, high-performance connections between your data centers, cloud environments, and edge locations in minutes. Scale bandwidth as you need (even up to 400G in some locations), cut down on unpredictable costs, and keep your network flexible as your business grows.
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