Four predictions for SD-WAN in 2018

2018 will be the year of WAN transformation, as rapidly evolving market forces and relentless innovation are shifting digital transformation into high gear and driving mass adoption of cloud computing, mobile, and the Internet of Things across businesses of all sizes and across a multitude of industries. All of these changes are stretching traditional WAN infrastructure to the breaking point in terms of capacity, speed, and variety of connection ports.

In 2018, things are going to change!

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Gigabit LTE will become mainstream

While much attention is being paid to 5G, the real story in 2018 will be Gigabit LTE. It is commercially viable, addresses the broadest use case of higher wireless WAN speeds and throughput with minimal carrier infrastructure upgrades. Gigabit LTE service will be available in NFL cities next year.

Speaking of 5G, as 5G services emerge from market experiments, we will see several leading mobile operators launch commercial 5G fixed wireless services in 2018.

With Gigabit LTE and 5G services becoming a reality by the middle of next year, coupled with the rapid parallel rise of SD-WAN, it’s safe to say that 2018 will usher in a new era of wireless WANs.

Consumer IoT devices will enter the enterprise

The trend that propelled the iPhone and Dropbox into the enterprise will continue to drive consumer IoT devices into businesses of all sizes. Most of these will be in the form of security and surveillance devices, which will lead to catastrophic security breaches and violations. These surveillance devices, along with a wide variety of sensors, will generate a massive amount of data, estimated to reach 600ZB by 2020.

Given the vulnerability of consumer devices and the explosive growth of WAN traffic, IT departments will look to software-defined perimeter technologies to provide access control and isolate IoT devices from existing networks that are isolated from each other to prevent Internet access.

The SD-WAN landscape will continue to evolve

Acquisitions of WAN-focused SDN vendors are on the rise, starting with Pertino’s acquisition of Cradlepoint in 2016 and more recently VMware’s acquisition of Cisco and VeloCloud’s acquisition of Viptela in 2017. This trend will not abate and will continue into 2018 as the SD-WAN vendor shakeout continues, with more vendor consolidation and segmentation to come.

Over the next year, we will see the SD-WAN market evolve into three scenarios:

1. The benefits of consolidation will focus on virtualizing and simplifying the WAN Edge infrastructure in branch-oriented networks by consolidating hardware devices (WAN+LAN), policy and security domains, and management systems.
2. The trend toward unification will extend beyond the branch architecture, allowing the value of software-defined and cloud-delivered access to extend to all WAN endpoints (including fixed, mobile and IoT).
3. All wired and wireless last-mile WAN links are backhauled through the thin edge to the provider’s or operator’s NFV point of presence, with or without lightweight traffic steering at the edge.

Additionally, as enterprise IoT combines with greater workforce mobility, software-defined perimeter solutions will evolve as a security-centric “companion” architecture like SD-WAN.

Edge computing will become an important part of the wide area network

As the volume of IoT data surges to over 600 ZBs by 2020, it will generate a massive amount of traffic that will be processed and stored in the cloud. This growth will legitimize edge computing as an important component of wide area networks in 2018 to process and analyze data stored in the cloud.

Based on the predictions here, it’s easy to see why I believe 2018 will be the year of WAN transformation. Looking ahead, the enterprise WAN requires an intelligent, Elastic EdgeSM that leverages pervasive wireless connectivity and software agility to connect people, places, and things everywhere and meet the massive demands of digital transformation.