IDC Calls Cloud Reason for Strong SD-WAN Future

As it rains here in New England today I can’t help but be reminded of the impact the cloud is making on the enterprise. And coupling this trend with the innovation taking place in the data center and software in general it is becoming abundantly clear the future is set to be software based. Already in the data center, this software defined frenzy has entered wide area networks (WAN) in a big way.

A recent report from the IDC (News - Alert) – “Cloud and Drive for WAN Efficiencies Power Move to SD-WAN” –forecasts the SD WAN market to grow at over 90 percent a year through 2020, placing a value of over six billion on the space. Initially, behaviors illustrated a shift toward hybrid WAN developments and not SD WAN builds off of existing architecture with a twist. It incorporates a centralized, application-based controller as well as analytics, network visibility and intelligent path selection.

IDC projects that a primary reason for SD-WAN growth will be enterprise demand for cost-effective networking in branch and remote offices as a result of the explosion in cloud development the demand for greater capabilities in virtual private networks is increasing. 

"As public and private cloud use continues to grow, WAN performance becomes critical to latency-sensitive and mission-critical workloads and inter-datacenter business continuity," said Rohit Mehra, Vice President, Network Infrastructure at IDC.

In leveraging SD-WAN, a company enjoys the benefits of a more efficient, flexible and cost effective model. SD-WAN optimizes SaaS (News - Alert) applications as well as cloud-based services.

Mehra continued, "As enterprises plan and implement comprehensive cloud strategies, WAN architectures need to be considered alongside, and in conjunction with, datacenter infrastructure. Moreover, as enterprises move business processes to the cloud, there is a greater need to fully integrate cloud-sourced services into WAN environments to ensure workload/application performance, availability, and security."

SD-WAN is not a fad, it is the future of wide area networks. The demands of today dwarf the network demands of only a few years ago. Is your network ready for tomorrow?