10 May 2022
SD-WAN has gained a lot of traction over the years as enterprises look to modernise their networks. But what criteria do businesses use – in other words, how do they know they need it? Robert Shepherd investigates
SD-WAN deployment by enterprises has grown substantially over the last few years.
Indeed, a report by Dell’Oro Group published last year, forecasts worldwide sales of SD-WAN technologies to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24% over the next five years, with the market expected to surpass $4bn in 2025. Much of that acceleration, the report says, will happen in 2022.
Additional highlights from the Dell’Oro Group SD-WAN Advanced Research Report, include: software accounted for more than 80% of SD-WAN revenue as of 2021, with its contribution expected to rise over the next five years.
Initially launched as a method of optimising data traffic across MPLS and IP-based connectivity, it’s evident that SD-WAN has assumed a rapid pace of evolution.
Still, deploying SD-WAN might not be for every company – so, for those that are unsure, how do network geeks evaluate whether it’s a necessity for their enterprise?
Dean Watson, lead solutions expert, professional services at IT specialist Nuvias,
says the business in question must consider the following questions: “Is our WAN footprint complex? Do we have branch locations that are difficult to service with high quality WAN links? Is our premise footprint dynamic? What are our current longest latencies and what would these look like with SD-WAN?”
For Toby Sturridge, chief technology officer, SDWAN Solutions, the list is endless.
“Where do we start?” he says. “There is an SD-WAN solution for every type of customer and requirement, from a single site that is perhaps moving to VOIP all the way through to enterprises with hundreds of sites. Any company that wants more network control, more visibility, more functionality, with less cost; or any company moving from MPLS to Cloud applications, expanding to new locations, opening more sites, or going through a digital transformation, using technology to the full benefit.”
It’s not just the vendors that (quite understandably) extol the virtues of and wax lyrical about SD-WAN. Brianna Boudreau, senior research manager at TeleGeography, the telecommunications market research firm, points to numerous reasons that have led enterprise customers to adopt this approach.
“Corporate traffic patterns and whether or not a team is already using a hybrid WAN are among the biggest drivers,” she argues. “Covid-19 and the shift to hybrid work environments accelerated the adoption of cloud services and forced WAN managers to permanently accommodate a remote-friendly, bring-your-own-device world. The drag on application performance due to indirect connections to cloud service providers has made traditional, all-MPLS networks less attractive.”
Brianna Boudreau, TeleGeography
“The WAN today requires (a lot) more bandwidth. Particularly as enterprises continue to adopt cloud services and rely on bandwidth-hungry video/UCaaS tools to keep employees connected in today’s hybrid work environment”
Indeed, Boudreau says that “as a result”, a majority of enterprise customers are pushing an internet-first WAN that integrates DIA and broadband alongside MPLS. “In fact, our latest WAN Manager Survey indicated that WAN managers had DIA running at 42% of their sites in 2021,” adds. “For the first time, MPLS usage dipped below half of average sites—46% of sites were running MPLS in 2021.”
Boudreau says another factor is network complexity in that while WAN managers can configure traditional CPEs to support these hybrid network designs, management can quickly become complex and burdensome as the network scales up. She says SD-WAN has been a major innovation in assisting enterprise network operators to manage this complexity.
Toby Sturridge, SDWAN Solutions
“There is an SD-WAN solution for every type of customer and requirement, from a single site that is perhaps moving to VOIP all the way through to enterprises with hundreds of sites”
“And third is the budget,” adds Boudreau. “The WAN today requires (a lot) more bandwidth. Particularly as enterprises continue to adopt cloud services and rely on bandwidth-hungry video/UCaaS tools to keep employees connected in today’s hybrid work environment. Our latest WAN Manager Survey also revealed that across MPLS, DIA, and broadband, the percentage of large port sizes being procured is growing, while port sizes 50 Mbps and under are declining 1-3% compounded annually. SD-WAN allows enterprise customers to integrate more cost-effective internet services into their WAN without sacrificing performance or security. For enterprises with increasing bandwidth requirements, but limited budgets, this makes SD-WAN appealing.”
Speak to any business owner around the world and different approaches and cultures lead to different rationales when deploying new technologies in methods.
Ferran van den Berg, Cerebo Networks
“Software is eating the world, and it also eats the WAN. SD-WAN, which brings programmability to wide area networks, is the logical evolution of enterprise networking technology”
But what, historically, is the biggest selling point of SD-WAN?
For openers, Gartner estimates SD-WAN solutions (not Sturridge’s company) can save 50% of both CAPEX and OPEX, compared to existing WAN routers. Meanwhile, Forrester’s Technology Adoption Profile states “90% of network managers want to evolve their WAN using a software-define approach”.
There are other biggest selling points, too.
“Originally, enterprise customers cited cost savings and leveraging multiple transport technologies as the main drivers for considering SD-WAN,” says Boudreau. “While cutting costs is certainly still a motivation, customers are also looking at the agility, security, and superior performance that an SD-WAN enabled network can provide. In fact, when we last surveyed WAN managers about their SD-WAN deployments, increasing site capacity, adding alternative access solutions, and improving network performance were the three most common reasons for adopting SD-WAN.”
Ferran van den Berg, managing director of Netherlands based MSP Cerebo Networks, adds:
Software is eating the world, and it also eats the WAN. SD-WAN, which brings programmability to wide area networks, is the logical evolution of enterprise networking technology. There are many different use cases for SD-WAN and enterprises must explore which use cases apply most for them, but any organization that still uses MPLS or traditional internet VPNs or needs to support the transition to the cloud, will gain benefits from SD-WAN.
Navinder Singh, In2IT Technologies
“The migration of legacy systems to next-generation technologies always poses a challenge and in this case may require a significant amount of effort”
As far as the UK is concerned, Sturridge says “it’s never been about cost, as there is not much difference in price between MPLS and DIA as an example”. He continues: “It’s always about performance, oversight and productivity, what the applications are and need, and being able to do more with less - be that less staff or indeed less costly connectivity technologies i.e. 4G or FTTx vs DIA. Add in covid-induced remote working or working from anywhere i.e. accessing corporate applications from anywhere and the business need for feature rich, simple, resilient and redundant SD-WAN is undeniable.”
Van den Berg argues that MPLS and hybrid networks have brought a lot of complexity to customers, but SD-WAN takes this complexity away. “Historically, SD-WAN sales have largely been driven by the increased adoption of SaaS applications, as enterprises want direct and optimised cloud access from the branch which is hard or impossible to realise with traditional solutions,” he says. “SD-WAN provides full control over the network via centrally configurable application policies, without the need for enterprises to worry about the complexity of the underlying network whatever WAN transport they are using.”
SD-WAN still has its detractors and critics. When researching for this feature, I was told:
“As remote work remains a part of everyday life, architectures like SASE are better suited for remote access than SD-WAN.”
With claims like that, does SD-WAN really stand up to scrutiny?
Sturridge says “we read scary statements like this every day”, which it claims are predicated based on fundamental misunderstanding of SD-WAN and SASE technologies.
“SD-WAN is a technology, SASE is a framework - they are not directly comparable,” Sturridge adds. “Anyone who is purporting to compare SD-WAN and SASE does not understand the terms well enough. SASE stands for Secure ACCESS Service Edge (the ACCESS part being SD-WAN) while SECURE SERVICE EDGE relates to multiple security technologies offered as part of the security framework. SSE is just SASE without SD-WAN and SSE does not have any resiliency or redundancy. Nor does it have any dynamic traffic management.”
When it comes to remote working – something many of us do now, thanks to Covid-19, Sturridge says his company’s products like SDWAN Remote and SASE Remote (both deviceless SD-WAN, one with and one without a full UTM security layer) fulfils work-from-anywhere criteria while still offering the benefits of SD-WAN at commercially attractive rates - with no VPN concentrator or manual VPN tunnel setup.
“Working from your home or from a coffee shop, using WI-FI or guest Wi-Fi and tethering from your mobile phone simultaneously to securely access the Internet or your corporate applications - over multiple connections, whatever they may be - and at the same time separating and securing your traffic from all other traffic on the same networks,” says Sturridge. “So if you’re at home in the middle of a virtual meeting and the kids decide they all want to watch 4k films simultaneously, it won’t degrade your meeting.”
Another accusation levelled at SD-WAN is cloud-native SASE offerings perform better and provide greater consistency than using SD-WAN. Again, Sturridge shoots this claim down.
“Cloud-native SASE doesn’t exist, but cloud-native security exists (SSE) and it works alongside SD-WAN for secure local internet breakout etc.,” he says. “But something has to route that traffic intelligently to the Cloud SSE – and that’s where the SD-WAN comes in.”
For Watson, “context is key here; many SASE offerings position a ‘backbone’ component to their solution to provide greater consistency than just sending international traffic over the internet’. He continues: “Some SASE vendors have built a dedicated infrastructure for the backbone, others piggyback over Azure vWAN or AWS inter-region links. This means that for international use-cases SASE solutions with a backbone can offer more consistent performance, but for domestic or regional use cases (Europe) where there is an inherent low latency between locations there would not be a tangible benefit to having a backbone as part of the solution.”
Businesses have fundamentally transitioned over the last two years, with working remotely or from home now firmly entrenched as both normal and desirable. This shift away from the secure networks of a closed office environment, toward more open networking using various cloud services and public internet, has been something of a challenge.
“The migration of legacy systems to next-generation technologies always poses a challenge and in this case may require a significant amount of effort,” says Navinder Singh, GM at In2IT Technologies. “It can also be a costly exercise to migrate existing networks onto an SD-WAN infrastructure, because this new protocol uses virtualisation extensively, which may not be supported by existing infrastructure. This would then mean that the entire backbone would need to be overhauled.”
However, Singh says that with any technology transition, having an experienced partner that understands both technology and business is instrumental. “The ultimate goal of SD-WAN is to enable flexibility and easier management, which requires a well-planned and well executed migration,” he adds. “A trusted IT partner will ensure that the promise of SD-WAN, including cost savings, improved performance, enhanced reliability and increased cloud readiness, are actually delivered.”
SD-WAN is certainly not going away – it’s evolving. In fact the Dell’Oro Group report also predicts that SD-WAN vendor consolidation is to continue over the next five years following a surge of acquisitions in 2020. That’s something worth looking at in the next SD-WAN feature.
Dean Watson, Nuvias
