Check out the five important characteristics of SD-WAN in 2019

SD-WAN has reached a new inflection point in 2019. IDC predicts that SD-WAN revenue will exceed $5 billion by 2023, and the market’s rapid growth has prompted Avant Communications to declare SD-WAN the most disruptive technology of 2019.

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At the same time, new vendors continue to enter the SD-WAN market, and existing vendors have to take measures to meet the fierce competition and stand out. According to the latest statistics, there are more than 60 vendors in the SD-WAN market vying for a piece of the pie.

The following will show the five representative characteristics of SD-WAN since 2019.

Room to grow

While there are dozens of SD-WAN vendors vying for market share, the technology is only just maturing.

Aryaka's latest "State of the WAN" report states that more than half of enterprises are preparing to switch from traditional WAN networks to SD-WAN in the next few years. Of the 795 IT and network practitioners surveyed in the report, only 12% of the respondents are deploying SD-WAN, 19% said they have completed the deployment, 48% said they are preparing to deploy, and 17% are actively evaluating vendors.

According to Avant Communications' SD-WAN report, automated failover, redundancy, simplified management and cost savings are the top factors driving SD-WAN adoption. The report states: "Avant believes SD-WAN will continue to make inroads into the high-end enterprise, starting with remote offices and other edges of the network and then moving closer to the core."

SD-WAN is here, but MPLS is far from gone

One of the biggest promises made by many SD-WAN vendors is that the technology will reduce costs by shifting bandwidth from expensive MPLS connections (or even eliminating the need for MPLS connections in some cases). More than half of the companies surveyed in the aforementioned Avant report said that cost savings from MPLS is a key issue, but most companies are still divided on whether to keep or replace their MPLS connections in favor of SD-WAN and broadband internet. About 40% of respondents said they plan to use a hybrid solution that combines the two.

However, considering the size of the enterprises surveyed, the results are stark: About half of large enterprises with annual revenues of more than $1 billion plan to increase their MPLS investments, while smaller enterprises show a willingness to quickly eliminate MPLS.

Despite the clear advantages that SD-WAN offers over traditional WAN, MPLS doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon.

Untapped Market

The willingness of small businesses to adopt new technologies has given smaller SD-WAN and managed service providers a foothold in this competitive market. Rather than competing with industry leaders like Cisco, VMware, and Aryaka, companies like Big Leaf Networks and Adtran have successfully focused their attention on serving small businesses, a market segment that has been neglected by larger enterprises.

According to Jon Seeber, general partner at Updata, small businesses represent more than $2 billion in untapped potential.

In the latest round of financing, BigLeaf received $21 million in cash. "Small and medium-sized businesses and enterprises are struggling to solve the connectivity problems of traditional network technologies," said Joel Mulkey, founder and CEO of Bigleaf, in a statement. "Other solutions currently available in the market are not suitable for many SaaS and cloud applications, require too much management, and are not smart enough to adapt to the speed of change in today's business."

Safety remains a top concern

Regardless of the size of your business, ditching MPLS for SD-WAN is not without its challenges, and one of the biggest issues remains security. This year, security has become a key factor in choosing an SD-WAN vendor.

Avant found that more than 74% of respondents said they were concerned about the damage posed by a cyberattack, while less than half felt their company was prepared to handle such an attack. These numbers are also reflected in a Gartner report released in late 2018 (sponsored by Fortinet), which surveyed 203 respondents with 25 or more WAN locations. The survey found that 72% ranked security as the top consideration when selecting an SD-WAN provider, rather than performance or cost.

As a result of this trend, many SD-WAN vendors that lack security features have sought to enhance their products through integration with firewall vendors such as Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, etc.

Meanwhile, security-centric vendors such as Fortinet and Barracuda have both announced enhancements to their next-generation firewalls, which in many cases are an integral part of their SD-WAN offerings.

Branch Office and SASE

Currently, vendors in the SD-WAN-related market space are entering two emerging areas: SD-branch and the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) recently announced by Gartner.

According to IDC analyst Brandon Butler, SD-branch is essentially an extension of SD-WAN that brings the same capabilities to new aspects of the network.

Meanwhile, Gartner described the newly added SASE category in its 2019 Hype Cycle report as combining elements of edge computing, security and wide area networking (WAN) into a single cloud management package.

Although it’s only been a few months, there are already multiple traditional SD-WAN vendors and security vendors claiming to offer “comprehensive” SASE platforms. Cato, Barracuda, and VMware are the first traditional SD-WAN vendors to make this claim.

SASE also opens the door for enterprises in the security space to enter the WAN market. Security company Palo Alto is the latest company to be listed on Gartner and announce a SASE product, and it will definitely not be the last.

Gartner predicts that several SASE products will be released by 2020 and that at least one of the major cloud service providers (Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft or Google) will enter the market soon.