Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Silver Peak and IDG Connect jointly conducted an official survey of 160 mid-market and enterprise companies to determine the true adoption of Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN).

According to a survey of 160 midmarket and enterprise companies conducted by IDG Connect and Silver Peak, companies are rapidly adopting software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN). Respondents said that fixed-line phones and traditional WAN architectures are not competitive because they are moving more applications and data to the cloud.

Today, only 27% of respondents report that SD-WAN has been implemented, while 92% expect to do so within the next 12 months.

This shift to SD-WAN will fundamentally change the way these companies communicate. Most companies will soon rely mainly on broadband and SD-WAN to connect their branches and remote offices.

75% to 100% of companies say their connections to branch and remote offices will use or utilize broadband within two years.

Why switch to broadband?

MPLS emerged at the beginning of the 21st century, when applications were hosted in corporate data centers and broadband was not readily available. However, today's applications exist in the cloud, reliable broadband is ubiquitous, and companies need to run at "cloud speed" to be competitive.

Due to the emergence of cloud-based applications today, MPLS is not sufficient to meet today's WAN requirements.

SD-WANs brings convenience to the company:

You can use Internet on many forms of connection to enhance MPLS

Exchange operators, mix and match, and even completely replace MPLS with broadband

Simplify branch office connectivity and securely deploy branch offices in minutes instead of weeks or months

Improve the overall performance of the network

Better network visibility and control

Make employees and others feel as if they are connected to a private line when they work.

Reduce WAN infrastructure costs by up to 90%

92% of respondents said that half of all branch office communications are now done using MPLS. But they also say that the two biggest problems with today's MPLS networks are their high cost and complexity. The use of dedicated lines is usually much more expensive than the broadband links used by SD-WAN coverage.

81% of the companies surveyed expect 75% to 100% of their connections to be broadband-based within two years.

Many companies have to wait weeks or even months before they can install landlines in their new offices. Due to the availability of MPLS lines in some areas, it takes longer to install MPLS at the branch. Broadband lines are more popular than MPLS lines and are easier to configure. The integration of broadband into the network architecture means that branch offices can be set up and connected in a few days and only a few hours in some subway areas.

What is the number of branch offices / remote sites in the organization?

Fifty-eight percent of respondents reported having 21 or more offices, so switching to SD-WAN is more important than ever. These growing companies cannot afford to spend weeks or months installing landlines at a cost that they cannot afford. Today's business needs a better choice.

Enterprises increasingly need to act quickly to deal with their competitors. Slower, more complex technologies are often seen as a major obstacle to success. In this case, the risk of technological backwardness may cause heavy losses. If they insist on using expensive, complex MPLS, they will eventually decline in terms of market share and profitability.

82% of respondents said they were frustrated by the complexity and high cost of MPLS.

While many organizations are frustrated with MPLS, they are still concerned about the way business-critical traffic is delivered over the Internet. Respondents said that security and reliability concerns are the main reasons why most organizations have not yet moved their business to SD-WAN.

In addition, 34 per cent of respondents said they were held back by existing MPLS contracts. As these contracts expire, customer concerns about security and reliability have been demonstrated by SD-WAN suppliers that SD-WAN can solve these problems. The migration of organizations to SD-WAN will accelerate rapidly.

Measure the security and reliability of SD-WAN

Considering that security and reliability used to be the most concerned issues in the transition from MPLS to broadband and SD-WAN, it is worth studying how the industry solves these problems.

Different industries, even companies in the same industry, have different views on the importance of security. But overall, improving network security is still a high priority.

SD-WAN vendors, like many cloud providers, have made significant progress in addressing customer security issues. Leading SD-WAN solutions can efficiently protect in-flight data, edge-to-edge IPsec encryption and avoid complex configurations.

Similarly, the newer SD-WAN technology solves the problem of reliability. Because broadband is much cheaper, many companies implement two different Internet links from two different providers compared to MPLS to ensure proper operation. If any of these links have a packet loss problem, SD-WAN can automatically route to other links with less loss.

Using public Internet can cause a lot of concerns, such as packet loss, jitter, and reliability, so when SD-WAN vendors describe the performance and reliability of their products, and how broadband behaves like a private line, how companies evaluate these suppliers is important. Companies can look for SD-WAN vendors that provide technologies such as ForwardError Correction, which use these technologies to send data to packets that are lost in transmission, as well as sequence corrections to handle packets that arrive out of order. Companies should seek suppliers to help them achieve 99.99% reliability.

Finally, we reached an inflection point. According to our survey of IT professionals, expiring MPLS contracts, frustrating MPLS costs and complexity have led to the emergence of a new disruptive technology, SD-WAN, designed to connect users to all types of applications, and now is the time to turn to SD-WAN.

Cloud and SD-WAN go hand in hand

Due to the transfer of SD-WAN, respondents expect a higher proportion of applications to run in the cloud in the future, all of which will require an infrastructure to support it.

70% of respondents reported that 50 or more applications are in the cloud now, but more are expected in two years' time.

With the rapid pace of moving to the cloud and the evolution of the company's continued adoption of SD-WAN, respondents expect a wide range of applications and programs to run on the Internet in the future.

MPLS has a history of 20 years, and even though current enterprises will shift from MPLS to SD-WAN, the survey found that this change will not prevent MPLS from disappearing. Because many companies' current networks are still hybrid networks, for example, in traffic, voice and video use MPLS links and other traffic uses broadband links. Today, 92% of companies have branches. Their connections to branch offices usually rely on MPLS and broadband or LTE. But they don't use SD-WAN, so they haven't experienced the benefits of SD-WAN.

SD-WAN as a managed service

94% of respondents said that WAN optimization is still important because these technologies are effective in optimizing WAN performance, such as deduplication, traffic shaping, and data caching.

Considering the complexity of building and managing a wide area network, many enterprises will consider turning to managed service providers. It is important for enterprises to find a provider who knows how to transition from traditional network to SD-WAN and supports cloud-centric service applications.

SD-WAN increases agility

Agility has become an important factor in today's business success. With cloud computing, companies can "upgrade" new products and services in minutes, rather than days or weeks.

The transition to this new WAN model is mainly focused on cost advantages and service improvements. Automatically select the best path for critical applications through broadband WAN to minimize disruption for organizations to introduce new services into WAN. One option is to restrict voice and video traffic to the MPLS network and use Internet VPN for the rest of the business.

It boils down to potential returns. As an organization, in order to reduce bandwidth costs, companies can fully deploy broadband wide area networks or adopt a hybrid approach, taking advantage of both broadband and MPLS. They can implement traffic policies based on industry and organizational requirements.

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