Why 2018 will be the year of WAN

Today, software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) technology is sweeping the entire industry and will develop from an emerging technology in 2017 to a mainstream market application in 2018.

Research firm IDC predicts that the SD-WAN market revenue will reach $2.3 billion in 2018, and the compound annual growth rate will reach 69% from 2018 to 2021, reaching a market size of more than $8 billion. "In 2017, many early adopters of SD-WAN were limited to maybe two or three sites," said Brad Casemore, a network analyst at IDC. "Today, with the increasing application of SD-WAN, people are beginning to see an inflection point in market growth."

Industry experts analyze that as SD-WAN deployment in corporate branches and remote offices becomes ubiquitous, greater changes will occur.

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Lee Doyle of Doyle Research explained: "We are moving from SD-WAN 1.0 to 2.0. SD-WAN 1.0 was about hybrid WAN approaches, aggregating multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) and Internet connections to reduce bandwidth costs and improve performance. SD-WAN 2.0 can provide a multi-tenant model, improved management and monitoring, and better security."

Doyle said SD-WAN 2.0 is not limited to WAN, but will go beyond the entire software-defined (SD) branch.

What is Software Defined (SD) Branch?

Doyle said WAN virtualization technology will soon mean that organizations won't need to deploy branch router infrastructure. IP/VPN, firewalls and Internet connectivity will be aggregated into software, reducing, if not replacing, the need for hardware at the branch. "SD-WAN vendors are rapidly adding functionality to the software," Doyle said.

Casemore said one of the biggest trends in 2018 is the further integration of security services into SD-WAN environments. ZScaler and Websense are software-based security platforms, and many industry vendors are working with SD-WAN vendors, including Viptela, VeloCloud, Riverbed and Talari.

SD-WAN applications have seen the biggest uptick in enterprises with many locations, such as banks and retail businesses. Capital One Bank is one of the top ten banks in the United States, with 45 million customer accounts and more than 700 branches, each of which requires a reliable Internet connection. The bank has provided non-traditional banking center services in the form of transitional cafes in recent years, encouraging customers to conduct banking services over the Internet. Jason Abfalter, technical director of Capital One Bank's retail and direct banking division, said: "Now, if our Wi-Fi system is down, then customers can't get our banking services. So the network needs to be secure at all times."

In this use case, CapitalOne Bank has begun a large-scale SD-WAN deployment across the corporate network. CapitalOne is able to provide customers with isolated, reliable, multi-band Wi-Fi connections to provide secure traffic for its back-office official banking operations. Abfalter said that as the deployment increases in 2018, he hopes to further integrate security tools such as URL filtering and firewall capabilities into the SD-WAN software.

Mobile backup in SD-WAN

Doyle said that using mobile connections as a backup to SD-WAN is expected to be another major technology advancement in the market in 2018. Large enterprises already have data plans from mobile communication providers, and in some cases they are able to pool data across the organization and use cellular network connections as a backup to broadband connections in failover situations. All of this can be managed through SD-WAN software deployed at the branch office. Doyle said that as the price of LTE and 4G technology continues to fall, this option will become more widely used.