After a sizeable uptick in the immediate post-pandemic world of work, questions are being raised over whether the software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) is now yesterday’s news.
For those who have been studying the industry for longer than they care to admit, it might seem there’s nothing the technology sector likes more than an abbreviation in the search for the next big thing.
In mobile, it’s the search for the next G. As generations of mobile infrastructures change every 10 years or so, perfectly good solutions and devices based on a standard – 4G being a classic example – suddenly become regarded as obsolete for no good technological reason. In the world of networking, there’s also no good reason to think that perfectly good technology, demonstrably capable of producing significant business benefits for users, is suddenly just legacy tech that needs replacing for the next generation. A great example is software-defined wide area networks.
If the hype and some reports are to be believed, SD-WAN is somewhat “old”, and is being superseded by secure service edge (SSE) in an ultimate transition to the next generation of network security in the form of secure access service edge (SASE). As the song says, don’t believe the hype.
In response to rapid data traffic growth, a growing reliance on cloud-based applications and the shift to distributed workforces, and as enterprises experience increasing network complexity and risk, SD-WAN is continuing to see rapid cross-industry growth and technology enhancements, such as the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.
Fundamentally, SD-WAN is, and will continue to be, a foundation for the enterprise networking and security stack. It is a key component in the convergence with advanced security championed by the SASE framework, which integrates managed cloud-based security into a complete network security offering.
To look at where we currently are with SD-WAN, we need to look back over the past five years or so, and start looking not at abbreviations but business priorities and what SD-WAN actually does – along with the effect of Covid-19. Companies with a distributed business had been investing in distributed infrastructures to support their future for some time before the outbreak of the pandemic. Covid-19 kickstarted these plans, placing an unprecedented dependence on the business network, primarily as a means of business continuity and keeping the lights on, and as the infrastructure on which a whole new hybrid model of working is now based.
Migration from legacy networks
For global sustainable food company Darling Ingredients, after an initial deployment before Covid-19 as part of a plan to convert all of its sites from legacy multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) networks, SD-WAN use and deployment increased rapidly over the nine months after the pandemic caused lockdowns in major economies as it faced the new realities of business.
By transitioning to SD-WAN, Darling Ingredients says it was able to get more bandwidth at a lower cost because it was no longer tied to service providers’ MPLS offerings and their pricing. That essentially gave the company the freedom to shop the market and find whoever could bring the best bandwidth at the most attractive price. A second major benefit was that with SD-WAN, Darling was able to route all Microsoft Office 365 traffic to the infrastructure supplier’s network instead of going out to the internet. By doing that, it witnessed a more predictive experience for users when it came to the voice and video applications on which the business was relying.
The growing global adoption of cloud computing has been a boon to SD-WAN, which even before March 2020 was seeing an uptick in demand as more enterprises looked to speed up connectivity and improve network resiliency, facets which have only become more important. Fast forward to 2024, and among the key drivers behind global SD-WAN investments are the need to optimise network connections to cloud-based applications and improve overall security posture. And SD-WAN has not stood still at all in the years since the pandemic.
Research by managed network and security services provider GTT Communications in May 2024, the results of which are presented in its Unlocking the potential – understanding managed SD-WAN adoption report, highlights the strategic importance of SD-WAN in enhancing connectivity to cloud services and ensuring access to critical resources supporting productivity and operational agility, while bolstering cyber security measures against ever-evolving threats.
Optimisation and security
The GTT research reveals that current SD-WAN deployments are mainly being driven by the need to optimise network connections to cloud-based applications (86%) and improve overall security posture (81%). Just under three-quarters (73%) of organisations are finding network complexity increasing and, as things get more distributed, the network becoming more critical to the business environment that has to connect up all of the enterprise’s cloud locations.
Moreover, 90% of businesses cite improving cyber security posture as their main driver for adoption, although fewer North American organisations (83%) agree with this. Yet intriguingly, increased complexity, risk and pace of innovation are driving as many as 80% of businesses to conduct regular upgrades of their SD-WAN offerings within two years, with around a third of these (34%) doing so every year.
Organisational awareness and readiness in the area of security are also reflected by the research data, with all of the IT, operations and networking security decision-makers surveyed in the US and Europe, at companies driving over $100m in annual revenue, reporting that they plan to integrate security when deploying SD-WAN either as a multiple supplier, best-in-class choice, or single stack/single supplier offering.
“As organisations become more digital, distributed and data-driven, managed SD-WAN continues to provide the foundation for the flexibility, security and efficiency needed to address their use cases and deliver the right business outcomes,” notes Tom Major, senior vice-president of product management at GTT, commenting on the findings. “Rapid innovation and security convergence through frameworks like SASE are driving shorter cycles for solution reviews and upgrades.”
Yet as well as looking at how SD-WAN is evolving technologically, it’s also necessary to see the evolution in how it is being deployed. Major believes managed service providers (MSPs) can help organisations address their need to evolve, based on the ongoing technological innovations, as well as the added complexity of selecting the best networking, security and connectivity for their businesses to align cost, performance and security requirements.
Bob Laliberte, principal analyst at TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), agrees. Indeed, he suggests that the vast majority of organisations want to consume SD-WAN as a managed service, alluding to an April 2023 report from Enterprise Management Associates that surveyed 313 IT professionals and found the percentage of enterprises with managed SD-WAN had increased from 62% in 2020 to more than 66% in 2023.
“They’re used to consuming their networking as a service, the MPLS links, everything else,” he says. “The other component to that is they don’t want to deal with each of the bandwidth providers, especially if they’ve got a highly distributed environment that’s global, if they can outsource that to either a telco or an MSP. I would brand them more co-managed. They want to be able to set the policies around which applications get prioritisation.”
Weeks before the Enterprise Management Associates study, the annual Enterprise network transformation survey from Aryaka found an uncertain economy was affecting network and security team investments, but CIOs, CISOs and IT leaders were doubling down on investment in the cloud and enterprise networking was witnessing the age of not just SASE, but also network as a service (NaaS).
It also revealed that the uptake of the latter and the continued decline of MPLS and a need to consolidate a sprawling supplier stack was forcing legacy suppliers to lose their long-time stranglehold on the enterprise network. Aryaka noted that NaaS was not only emerging, but “exploding on the scene” as one of the only viable solutions for IT leaders to solve the growing complexity of an anytime, anywhere world.
Aryaka’s research also identified key expected advantages of SD-WAN from managed solutions, including time and cost reduction and agility. Yet it also found a number of potential barriers to effective deployment according to how it is deployed. These include whether to go single or dual supplier, the complexity of the implementation and setting a migration strategy.
With regard to the emergence of managed provision of SD-WAN, Laliberte adds: “You’re controlling the policies that are implemented, but you’re letting the managed service provider deal with all the upgrades, patches, dealing with the internet service providers, so when there’s an issue, you don’t have to be the one figuring out who’s the provider in that country. It’s really removing that headache of management and enabling them to focus on making sure the experience and the applications are delivering good performance.”
The future of SD-WANs
ESG studies from 2023 reveal that SD-WAN will be fundamental in connecting remote and hybrid workforces for some time. Some 89% of the firms studied plan to support their remote and hybrid workers with SD-WAN, while 4% already do so. Interestingly, firms are not anticipating a splurge in capital expenditure in doing so, with 50% saying they are “more likely” to deploy SD-WAN without new hardware and 48% being “somewhat more likely”.
Looking at the future direction of SD-WAN, the conversation, inevitably, sees a return to the abbreviations and the alphabet soup. Namely, in enterprise networking, MPLS is “out”, while SSE and SD-WAN are part of the road to SASE systems, with more firms eliminating all on-prem datacentres and cloud adoption steaming ahead.
ESG expects SASE projects to be led by SSE. Its 2023 studies show that 58% of firms are focused or will focus on the SSE side of SASE first, with 36% having begun with SD-WAN. The research also shows the need for direct cloud connectivity to services such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure is the top driver for going to SD-WAN, followed by needing an integration solution that delivers security and networking at branch sites. Just 3% have taken, or will take, a fully converged SASE approach from the start.
ESG’s Laliberte concludes with the prediction that SD-WAN will be around for a while. Given what enterprises actually need to do, it is hard to disagree.