6 SD-WAN trends to watch in 2020

SD-WAN reached a new inflection point in 2019. During this year, the SD-WAN market remained hot as distributed organizations widely deployed SD-WAN to address wide area network bandwidth limitations and improve the quality of user experience for cloud-based applications.

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Dozens of vendors are rapidly improving their SD-WAN offerings by accelerating cloud adoption, supporting leading SaaS applications, and innovating security and management/automation platforms.

In 2020, SD-WAN is about to enter the 2.0 stage. What issues do we need to pay attention to?

Supplier Viability

SD-WAN is a highly active market with more than 50 vendors currently in the market. Basic SD-WAN features have become standard across all routing and next-generation firewall providers. As more vendors offer SD-WAN, the differences between different feature sets may become more complex. Doyle Research expects that by 2020, some edge SD-WAN vendors will exit the market or be acquired. IT managers should carefully evaluate the viability of SD-WAN solutions.

Accelerate cloud migration

Enterprises will continue to increase their use of multiple infrastructure as a service platforms (IaaS), such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, etc. Most SD-WAN vendors have established partnerships with leading cloud platforms, and they use a variety of methods to accelerate traffic in and out of the cloud platform. One option is to place a virtual copy of the SD-WAN program on the IaaS cloud to simplify traffic. SD-WAN vendors also use the location of the current point (point of present) on the private network to pass traffic at the nearest point on the AWS or Azure cloud for the lowest latency.

Organizations implementing multi-cloud should evaluate the ability of SD-WAN platforms to seamlessly integrate with leading cloud platforms, including one-click connectivity for branch offices, customizable APIs, performance optimization, and end-to-end performance visibility. During 2020, SD-WAN service capabilities will continue to be enhanced to help IT organizations migrate between various IaaS platforms.

Enhanced support for SaaS

Enterprises rely on dozens of software as a service (SaaS) vendors to provide best-in-class applications for unified communications, office suites, CRM, accounting, and many more specialized services. For IT departments, ensuring the quality of service for these applications is a challenge because each SaaS provider has its own unique set of services, security mechanisms, APIs, and management tools.

Most SD-WAN platforms can identify traffic to and from SaaS providers by IP address and traffic type. IT departments can set specific policies, security, and compliance standards for each SaaS service on the SD-WAN management interface. Some SD-WAN products have specific business relationships and tight integrations with leading SaaS platforms, notably Microsoft's Office 386.

SD-WAN platforms also provide pre-set high-priority policies for real-time applications such as unified communications and video. In 2020, SD-WAN vendors will continue to provide appropriate QoS for critical SaaS applications without IT intervention.

Built-in security

SD-WAN provides abundant bandwidth using relatively insecure Internet connections, which may make branch offices and edge devices vulnerable to security attacks and data leakage. Therefore, SD-WAN deployment needs to provide additional security to facilitate staff to safely implement company policies in branch offices. Security features should include traffic visibility, policy control, and protection against direct threats and attacks.

Most SD-WAN vendors add built-in security to their platforms, including encryption and stateful firewalls. Other security features include intrusion prevention systems, URL and content filtering, malware detection, and DDoS protection.

SD-WAN products also need to provide strong visibility into applications, protocols, and devices for easy inspection by operators. SD-WAN platforms now provide automatic policies to determine which traffic should pass through specific network links and are able to whitelist and blacklist traffic from specific locations. During 2020, SD-WAN vendors will continue to improve the depth and breadth of local network security capabilities.

Enhancing security partnerships

Large organizations usually have dedicated security (SecOps) personnel responsible for protecting company assets from attacks. They have deployed many products and services from leading security vendors, including next-generation firewalls, application delivery controllers, IPS, malware detection, network access control, etc.

In 2020, SD-WAN vendors will strengthen their ties with strategic security partners. At the same time, IT buyers will also have a greater expectation that SD-WAN capabilities can be integrated with their favorite network security products. These security partners should provide a console with centralized orchestration and management capabilities. Through this platform, security or IT staff should be able to easily distribute security policies to remote branches.

Management, Automation, and Orchestration

As SD-WAN becomes an integral part of IT infrastructure, it must scale seamlessly to hundreds or thousands of locations and work well with existing network and application management platforms. During 2020, SD-WAN providers will continue to improve SD-WAN management and automation through the following areas:

• The ability to easily set application performance priorities and let the network make routing decisions.
• IT administrators can quickly change locations, add or remove ISPs, install new applications, or connect IoT devices
• Dashboards provide graphical representation of the health of your network and the performance of key applications.

SD-WAN providers still have a long way to go to achieve fully automated, intent-based WANs, but in 2020 they will enhance SD-WAN capabilities to make it easier for IT to pinpoint the cause of application degradation or outages, quickly connect IoT devices, view network status, and unify multiple management consoles.