Report Finds Big Jump in SD-WAN Adoption

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SD-WAN installations have seen a big jump over the last two years, according to new SD-WAN adoption research from TeleGeography.

The company’s WAN manager survey shows that 43% of enterprises had SD-WAN installed in 2020, compared to only 18% in 2018.

WAN managers pursued the technology to increase site capacity and to provide alternative access solutions, researchers said. Forty percent of respondents prefer a co-managed SD-WAN solution.

SD-WAN’s gains seem to be coming, in large part, from a decline in MPLS. The average network had MPLS at only 58% of sites in 2020, compared to 82% in 2018.

Direct internet access (DIA) is often used as the underlying technology for SD-WAN. More than one quarter of DIA sites in the Telegeography research operated at speeds above 100 Mbps.

A key challenge for WAN managers at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic was congestion at internet gateways as more people worked from home, according to Telegeography, which found that 85% of enterprises reported that the majority of their workforce was working remotely at some stage in 2020.

“SD-WAN has dramatically increased in adoption in the last couple of years. The pandemic slowed down roll-outs for a time, but increased interest in adoption,” said Greg Bryan, TeleGeography senior manager, enterprise research, in a prepared statement about the SD-WAN adoption research. “SD-WAN frees WAN managers to select a broad mix of underlay technologies, and can also boost performance. The full report offers a clear picture into how mid-to-large enterprises are adjusting to emerging WAN technologies, helping vendors make more informed decisions.”

“A growing number of WAN managers are seeing the opportunity in SD-WAN and adapting their networks, which could explain the 24% decrease we’ve seen in MPLS from 2018 to 2020,” said Elizabeth Thorne, TeleGeography research analyst, enterprise networks, in a prepared statement. “The pandemic caused enterprises across the globe to really re-evaluate their operations and seek new ways to improve performance and efficiency. It’ll be interesting to see the lasting effects of the pandemic in terms of accelerating digital transformation and changing networking models globally.”

An earlier report from Vertical Systems Group predicted that SD-WAN revenues would rise substantially through 2024 after a brief decline in its growth rate in 2020 due to the pandemic.