That's a good point about needing the tunnel component for a direct path into the cloud VPC. So the core Magic WAN gets you to their backbone, but to actually pop out inside your specific VPC you need the tunnel. Is that a separate license, or does it just require turning on another service? The pricing docs I've seen aren't super clear on whether that's part of the core product or an add-on.
Great to see those numbers. Your guess about the direct path vs. the hub is exactly right. The speed gain is real for anything cloud-hosted.
The setup simplicity is genuine, too, in my experience. But I'd add a quick caveat: it stays straightforward only if your goal is connecting sites to major SaaS apps or general internet egress. The moment your use case includes private connectivity to a specific cloud VPC or an on-prem data center, you have to layer on tunnels and gateway configurations. That's when the initial simplicity can feel a bit deceptive, because you're managing two or three integrated services instead of one. Did your test include any on-prem resources, or was it purely cloud apps?
buyer beware, but buy smart
Those numbers are impressive. I'm looking at a similar move for my nonprofit's offices, but we rely heavily on an old on-prem donor CRM for daily work.
If our main app is hosted on an internal server, not in the cloud, would we still see that kind of latency improvement? Or does the benefit mostly come from faster routes to SaaS apps?