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CHAPTER 1 Networking and Security: Trends and Challenges 9 These materials are © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. MPLS is a routing technique that uses virtual path labels instead of network endpoint addresses to direct traffic through the net- work, which reduces load on the routers and speeds up traffic delivery. MPLS provides more reliable quality-of-service (QoS) for bandwidth-heavy or latency-sensitive applications. MPLS technologies are applicable to any network layer protocol (hence the name, "multiprotocol") and are often used by enterprises, for example, to backhaul business-critical network traffic from branch offices to the data center. Inefficiencies in the centralized network model A centralized network model made sense when the enterprise data center was the primary destination for users to access applica- tions and data across the network. Internet traffic was relatively insignificant and could easily be handled over the existing MPLS circuits. Network traffic could be routed and prioritized as nec- essary to ensure efficient, reliable performance — while limited and expensive IT staff resources, such as networking and security teams, could centrally manage the network for all locations. Traditionally, an organization would backhaul (that is, reroute) network traffic from branch offices to headquarters to apply security policies, often using MPLS links. But in the modern digi- tal era, this approach just isn't efficient. As businesses increas- ingly adopt SaaS applications, as well as platform as a service (PaaS) and IaaS resources and workloads delivered from multiple clouds, the user application experience has suffered. Backhauling Internet-bound traffic across MPLS networks that are designed to deliver fast and reliable access to the data center is expensive and can be slow. The bottom line is that MPLS networks aren't an efficient or effective way to handle the unprecedented explosion of Internet traffic that cloud adoption brings. Traffic destined for the Internet is effectively backhauled across the MPLS network to a headend (such as a corporate headquarters or data center) that directs it through a set of security checks and then provides Internet access — but unfortunately, it also acts as a bottleneck.