Global WAN survey highlights the importance of network simplification

Cato Networks, provider of the global SD-WAN as a service Cato Cloud, released the findings of its enterprise WAN market study.

The report, “State of WAN 2018: Too Complex to Ignore,” predicts SD-WAN will grow 200% year-over-year. At the same time, the additional abstraction layer that is SD-WAN and its impact on the network security architecture significantly increases WAN complexity. Simplification for connectivity, security, and the cloud will be major themes for WAN transformation in 2018.

Simplification of network and security architectures are essential for SD-WAN success

• Half of the respondents indicated simplifying the network or their security infrastructure will be primary use cases for SD-WAN in 2018.
• A quarter of respondents planning to deploy SD-WAN indicated “additional complexity” as a primary barrier to further investment.
• Respondents had complexity concerns with both SD-WAN vendors and providers. Overall, 30% say SD-WAN appliances are too complex followed by SD-WAN services (23%).

Network security and cloud integration will play a role in the selection of SD-WAN solutions

• 81% of those respondents actively planning an SD-WAN deployment in the next 12 months identify “protecting locations and the site-to-site connections from malware and other threats” as a “critical” or “very important” priority in their SD-WAN decision making.
• Overall, more than three-quarters of respondents (78%) ranked improving cloud or Internet performance as a “critical” or “very important” SD-WAN priority.
• Cloud datacenter-WAN integration was the third most popular primary use case for the next 12 months.
• Microsoft Office 365 was the most popular cloud application (75% of respondents) followed by Salesforce.com (30% of respondents).
• Microsoft Azure was the most popular cloud datacenter service (70% of respondents) followed by Amazon AWS (53%), Google Cloud (12%), and Alibaba Cloud Compute Services (1%).

The drive for simplification is pushing enterprises to leverage service providers for SD-WAN and security

• Last year, 30% of respondents identified their SD-WAN supplier as a “service provider” or “carrier.” This year that number grew to 49% of respondents.
• Enterprises are shifting to a service model for more than just networking. Security is a case point. Firewall as a Service (FWaaS) showed the greatest potential for growth of any security solution for the cloud with 60% of respondents expecting to adopt the technology in 12 months.
• More broadly, security investment will remain high with 73% of respondents expecting security budgets to increase over the next 12-24 months. Nearly half of respondents (48%) expect networking budgets to increase during the same period.

Management models play a role in selecting SD-WAN services

• 49% of respondents preferred co-managing their SD-WAN, the kind of management model seen with Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and other cloud services.
• 32% of respondents indicated replacing their MPLS service with an affordable alternative to be a primary focus in 2018.
• Only 17% of respondents wanted a fully-managed service.

“While our survey shows strong positive momentum for SD-WAN as a category, it also uncovers major shortcomings,” said Shlomo Kramer, founder and CEO of Cato Networks. “When organizations invest in SD-WAN point solutions they may carry forward the legacy baggage of the traditional WAN — expensive MPLS services, appliance sprawl, and the overhead of maintaining and updating branch security solutions — limiting the business impact of WAN transformation. Our future networks must holistically address global connectivity, network security, cloud integration and mobile access to truly drive the business forward.”