Hybrid WAN FEATURED ARTICLE

A new report from Grudi Associates sings the praises of the popular technology known as SD-WAN. And it says that this technology is clearly the future of wide area networks.

“SD-WAN is one of today’s hottest new telecom and IT topics, and for good reason,” says Walt Grudi, president of Grudi Associates. “It leverages cutting-edge technology and connectivity to provide businesses with a much more powerful, efficient, cost-effective wide area network solution. Most importantly, it can achieve 100 percent network uptime.”

The report, “SD-WAN: Simplified,” indicates this technology can be used for application prioritization, broadband aggregation, dynamic bandwidth, and network firewall virtualization.

“SD-WAN optimizes the functionality and benefits of the connections a business has,” adds Grudi. “The advantages are extensive, including network optimization, greater manageability, enhanced security, better compliance, faster ‘go-live’ time, easier international accessibility, expanded scalability and more.”

Worldwide SD-WAN infrastructure and services revenues will see a compound annual growth rate of 69.6 percent and reach $8.05 billion in 2021, according to IDC (News - Alert).

"SD-WAN is not a solution in search of a problem," says Rohit Mehra, vice president, Network Infrastructure at IDC. "Traditional WANs were not architected for the cloud and are also poorly suited to the security requirements associated with distributed and cloud-based applications. And, while hybrid WAN emerged to meet some of these next-generation connectivity challenges, SD-WAN builds on hybrid WAN to offer a more complete solution."

Andrew Lerner of Gartner (News - Alert) agrees. In a June blog he wrote: “While many networking technologies are over-hyped as the next big thing, SDWAN is delivering on the promise. In just three short years, adoption has taken off and we now estimate 6,000+ paying SDWAN customers with more than 4,000 production implementations. We recommend you look at SDWAN when refreshing WAN edge equipment, renegotiating a carrier contract, building out new branches, or aggressively moving apps to the cloud (among other reasons).”