What an epic change just a few years can bring. Digital technologies, including cloud, mobile, social, and big data, have transformed not only the way we do business, but also practically every aspect of our lives. We’re now immersed in connectivity 24/7, staring at screens and absorbed in apps even while walking down the sidewalk. We live in a digital world, carrying more than 6 billion mobile phones, with over one-seventh of the world’s population active on Facebook, and 85 - 95% (estimates vary) of businesses using the cloud. And, with the rise of Internet of Things looming on the horizon, we’re just getting started.
But ask almost any network administrator, and they’ll tell you: managing a network in today’s customer-experience-focused and cloud-centric world isn’t easy. Supporting the rapid adoption of cloud services, an insatiable demand for bandwidth-intensive apps like voice and video, and the tens, hundreds, and sometimes thousands of business-critical remote sites is difficult enough. Having to do so with an underlying networking infrastructure that hasn’t changed much in 20 years? Painful.
Yet it’s true: While businesses are going digital to better align with customer expectations, they’re still tethered to legacy, hardware-bound networks that are far too complex, costly and fragile.
Industry analyst projections indicate enormous pent-up demand for newer and better approaches to networking – the time for disruption is now. Enter software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) – a radically new approach to networking in a cloud-centric world. According to recent IDC predictions, the SD-WAN market is set to swell to $6 billion by 2020 — and that’s not the most surprising number. Only 1% of enterprises use SD-WAN today. In the next eighteen months, IDC expects that number to grow to an almost unbelievable 70%. There are several reasons for this:
The pervasiveness of cloud
Cloud-first and cloud-only approaches are disrupting the status quo and replacing the defensive no-cloud stance that many large providers have traditionally sworn by. Whether it’s Salesforce, an HR admin tool or an Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering – enterprises are finding tremendous value in the cloud. Studies show companies to use 6 clouds on average, and this reliance is only increasing. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2020, a corporate “no-cloud” policy will be as rare as a “no-internet” policy today. At the end of the day, this means networks need to dynamically access multiple locations outside the internal network. These needs are fulfilled much better by SD-WANs than costly MPLS connections.
Keeping up with digital transformations
A recent report by IDC shows that while the pace of digital transformation is accelerating in Asia/Pacific, organizations in the region are lagging behind their global counterparts in terms of digital transformation maturity. The pressure to keep up has never been higher. Several years ago, few would have viewed them as such a priority. Now the writing is on the wall. For example, chat-based customer service can be a major competitive advantage. But when all your competitors are doing it, it becomes a matter of survival. It’s the same for processing existing data to generate predictive analytics, giving employees consumer functions like mobile accessibility, or any number of activities. These trends aren’t reversing anytime soon. Companies are looking for ways not only to support them, but to deploy them quickly across many locations. And as IDC so aptly points out: “Organizations in Asia/Pacific need to focus on accelerating their digital capabilities, otherwise they will face irrelevance.”
The need for speed, powered by SD-WAN
Businesses – especially those in Asia/Pacific - are realizing that speed is essential. They’re turning to software to bypass slow hardware constraints. Say, for example, a global company based in Singapore wants to use cross-functional, cross-continental teamwork with a new Unified Communications system. Workflows must adapt to new business realities. Transitioning to new tactics will require agility. From an operational standpoint, this will inevitably create demands for speed in the sense of network performance.
SD-WAN enables businesses to fulfill both speed requirements. Centralized cloud-based management allows applications and services to be rolled out to multiple locations quickly. The business can implement change quickly. As bandwidth for video starts putting a strain on the network, traffic can be prioritized and sent over the best path automatically, hitting two birds with one stone. SD-WAN’s ability to use business logic and adapt the network for applications needs unlocks a level of abstraction that helps enterprises gain both agility and performance.
But let’s be clear: these aren’t just luxury features for businesses. It’s easy to claim these capabilities are nice but ultimately unnecessary. However, one look at today’s networking challenges reveals the truth. If you look at the fast-moving world that enterprises work in today, however, with all its clouds and digital complexity, the necessity of SD-WAN couldn’t be any more obvious. Four years ago, Marc Andreessen said “software is eating the world,” and for anybody who hasn’t been living under a rock, it’s clear that in the next 18 months, it will be eating the WAN.
Bjorn Engelhardt is Senior Vice President, Riverbed Asia Pacific & Japan