Multiprotocol Label Switching

For decades, distributed companies have relied on incredibly expensive hub and spoke network models.

You pay a premium for MPLS lines, multi-protocol label switching or heavy dedicated site to site VPN tunnels simply because the laptops in the branch office have to constantly talk back to a central domain controller to authenticate, change passwords, and update group policies.

But if the laptop is underjoined, it just needs the internet.

Precisely.

By eliminating the branch domain controller, you sever the requirement for the corporate backbone.

You can completely restructure the network budget by converting those expensive MPLS and VPN contracts into commodity, direct-to-internet broadband paired with SD-WAN for routing optimization.

But what about the few legacy apps that haven't been phased out yet? If an employee at a branch office needs to access an internal inventory system hosted back at headquarters, and we've killed the VPN, how do they connect?

You utilize Entra Private Access.

That is, you still use the packet header, and you look at it at every router or switch along the way.

Now, MPLS is a technology that, that non-networking people don't, uh, you know, probably don't know.

The only thing you need to know about it, A, it's used widely in, in large networks, and it makes a distinction between the edge and the core of the networks.

The edge uses the header as the host network interface.

Think of a label just as a bag of bits that's only meaningful within the network.

It means nothing to the host.

So it inserts an MPLS label, and then the core, the interior of the network, doesn't look at the packet header at all.

It just looks at that label and says, "Somebody already interpreted what this host was trying to do.

Some people are going to hate this and some people are going to be like, that kind of makes sense.

I consider it the layer 2.5 of dual stack, right? It's the MPLS layer of dual stack because it's not quite IPv6 only, but it's further than just dual stack on every host.

It's the ARP.

Yeah, I mean, it's the right in the middle, right? Because you have...