What Are the Main Drivers of SD-WAN Adoption? | Cloud Service provider Canada

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What Are the Main Drivers of SD-WAN Adoption?

With the ready availability of cloud-based services, more and more business enterprises are adopting technologies with a view to improve their products and services offered to clients worldwide. There has been an understanding that traditional WANs that were built using the MPLS services are not efficient to handle the vast amount of traffic that is generated currently. Even though, with MPLS, one can centralize the internet security due to the backhauling of the internet from the branch offices to the data centers, there are performance problems with the procedure.

As the cloud becomes more accessible, there has been a growth in the demand for SD-WAN, the market for which is expected to rise by millions over the coming years. SD-WAN is supposed to have a greater impact over the enterprise IT efficiency because of its relationship with the cloud services, WAN management and operational requirements. With the help of SD-WAN, organizations can optimize their cloud applications as well as create a dynamic and secure WAN across various branch locations.

Most enterprises claim that they made the shift to SD-WAN in order to simplify the WAN infrastructure, use numerous WAN providers and also to offload non-critical business apps to broadband internet services. The majority of business organizations cite bandwidth optimization to be the primary reason for their shift to SD-WAN. Some other reasons that make SD-WAN a favorable option with small and medium businesses is because of the consistent application security and improved automation and self provisioning. Some other motivational factors for the SD-WAN adoption include faster deployment, operational efficiency and also the reduced complexity in the deployment procedure.

While most technological innovations are bound to face some amount of misgivings in the initial stage, SDWAN has been an outlier. Ever since its inception, SDWAN has been accepted because of the numerous advantages that it has to offer, namely, savings in the cost, improved performance and simplified management. Only in a few years, we have seen significant advances in the use of SDWAN. Below, we highlight some of the factors driving the growth in SDWAN adoption.

  • Concerns with traditional WAN: Traditional WAN is not suited to handle the massive amounts of traffic that are generated in the current age. As a result, these WANs have been struggling with performance delivery and availability. The traditional MPLS based architectures which are based on dated security and protocols related to governance, are inefficient and leading to unnecessary latency. These WAN infrastructures are also seen to be more at risk for cyber attacks because of its static and inflexible nature. Therefore, SDWAN offers the best alternative to traditional WAN architecture.
  • Increasing use of multimedia: Over the years, one of the best ways to share valuable information is through the use of audio-visual media. The multiple variants of multimedia help business organizations to engage with their clients. In order to handle the large volumes of multimedia and the transactional data associated with it, business organizations require more bandwidth, which is only possible when using the advanced SDWAN infrastructure.
  • Hybrid nature of IT: With the rise in the use of hybrid IT, there has been an increase in the systems and platforms outside the firewall that have numerous applications within the enterprise. By using various cloud infrastructures, enterprise networking, provisioning and routing needs have seen a dramatic change. As the traditional WAN networks work effectively in the hybrid environment, IT needs to over-provision the network resources. In this respect, SDWAN helps to provide the flexibility to manage the cloud resources in an optimal manner.
  • The unpredictability of business needs: Over the years, consumer expectations have seen a dramatic change. This can be seen in the ease with which customers have been adapting to new and improved technologies. With evolving markets and consumer expectations, it has become important for business organizations to ensure that their networks are resilient enough to adapt to new conditions, thus improving the performance, availability, latency and security. For ever-increasing business needs, SDWAN offers a reliable alternative compared to the traditional WAN infrastructure.
  • Rapid scaling in the SDWAN infrastructure: The biggest factor that is responsible for the growth of the SDWAN infrastructure has to be the vast improvements in the SDWAN platform and services. This has allowed organizations to leverage a combination of broadband, MPLS and other network sources for providing better service.

The above mentioned factors point to the need of an SDWAN infrastructure to take full advantage of the cloud based interfaces and to centralize the control of the network. Therefore, business organizations stand to gain enormously when implementing the SDWAN infrastructure for their business enterprises.