Study finds SD-WAN appliances will replace branch routers, cloud security is gaining increasing appeal and WAN optimisation remains critical for enterprises
Fifty-one percent of enterprises in Australia plan to deploy SD-WAN in the next 12-24 months, with banking and financial services companies holding the greatest deployment potential, according to a Frost & Sullivan global end-user market survey sponsored by Silver Peak®, the global SD-WAN leader, delivering the transformational promise of the cloud with a self-driving wide area network. The survey revealed that 55 percent of Australian respondents intend to replace existing branch routers with an SD-WAN appliance that supports routing functionality during this time.
The survey was conducted by Frost & Sullivan to gain insights into the current mindset of enterprise IT decision makers regarding SD-WAN market trends and their impact on enterprise WAN architectures. The study included responses from 850 individual companies across five industries and spanned eight key countries around the world – 150 respondents came from Australia and New Zealand.
The study revealed the top three reasons that Australian companies are turning to SD-WAN are to deploy new branch sites faster; apply granular security policies; and achieve superior WAN and application performance. These organisations are embracing SD-WAN appliances with integrated routing and WAN optimisation functions, while keeping existing customer premises equipment (CPE)-based solutions at other sites until maintenance contracts expire.
The survey results affirm that SD-WAN is a high technology priority for enterprises in Australia in the next 12-24 months, alongside hybrid cloud services and network and application security.
“This isn’t surprising as these three technologies are intertwined and directly support the top business driver of improving the overall customer experience,” said Mark Dougan, managing director of Frost & Sullivan in Australia and New Zealand. “What is surprising, however, is the mindset regarding various WAN functions while evaluating SD-WAN, especially the intent of Australian organisations to replace CPE routers with an SD-WAN appliance with integrated routing functionality.”
Other key findings:
Cloud security gains increasing appeal – Australian respondents are looking to embrace cloud-based security services supported by their SD-WAN vendor, to retire or augment CPE-based firewall solutions at different company sites. 62 percent of Australian respondents indicated that they plan to service chain cloud-based security services with their SD-WAN solution.
WAN optimisation remains critical – Despite the hype about SD-WAN making WAN optimisation redundant, a significant number of Australian respondents indicated that WAN optimisation remains critical for them. They either want WAN optimisation as an integrated function with SD-WAN (71 percent) or at a minimum for the SD-WAN solution to interoperate with their existing solution (67 percent).
“As Australian companies adopt SD-WAN, they’re shifting from a traditional router-centric WAN model toward a business-first model that ensures resiliency and business continuity, while delivering superior WAN and application performance,” said Graham Schultz, ANZ regional director for Silver Peak.
“Enterprises also want to integrate network functions at the WAN edge to reduce complexity and cost. Unified WAN optimisation and other unique capabilities make the Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect™ SD-WAN edge platform ideally suited to address the challenges facing highly distributed organisations throughout Australia.”
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About Silver Peak
Silver Peak is the global leader in broadband and hybrid WAN solutions. Silver Peak offers a high-performance SD-WAN solution that provides secure and reliable virtual overlays to connect users to applications with the flexibility to use any combination of underlying transport without compromising application performance. This results in greater business agility and lower costs. More than 3,000 globally distributed enterprises have deployed Silver Peak broadband and hybrid WAN solutions across 100 countries. Learn more at www.silver-peak.com.