Survey shows: SD-WAN deployment is growing rapidly, MPLS will not disappear

Recently, Cato Networks released a survey report of global professionals, which showed that the SD-WAN market is expected to grow significantly, but it will not eliminate MPLS in the short term, and the security aspect of SD-WAN is attracting more and more attention.

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The survey data of 350 IT professionals shows that the adoption rate of SD-WAN will increase by 200% over the same period last year, which means that at least 20% of respondents plan to deploy SD-WAN next year.

As shown in the figure above, 19% of respondents said their company plans to deploy SD-WAN technology within the next year, while 10% of respondents said they have already deployed SD-WAN. However, more respondents said they have no plans to deploy SD-WAN (47%), 63% of respondents are concerned about the cost of new SD-WAN equipment or services, and more than half said they are investing in network security equipment together with SD-WAN equipment.

Although some enterprises have already invested in SD-WAN, they said they will continue to invest in MPLS. 62% of respondents who have already deployed SD-WAN said their MPLS investment has increased or remained the same, forcing enterprises to maintain Internet and MPLS-based infrastructure. Many respondents who plan to deploy SD-WAN said they will reduce their reliance on MPLS and make cloud performance their top priority for SD-WAN deployment.

In fact, MPLS does not seem to disappear and will soon form a hybrid model with the large-scale deployment of SD-WAN.

This survey fully shows how enterprises use SD-WAN technology, as well as some of the problems faced by SD-WAN technology, such as security and the cost of managing hybrid network connections. However, this survey report shows that half of the respondents said they would increase their network budgets in the next one to two years. In addition to SD-WAN, the priorities they pointed out include WAN agility, end-to-end security, and eliminating traffic backhaul.

Cato Networks' survey report is to promote its security portfolio for SD-WAN and Cato Cloud. Cato Networks focuses on cloud-based networks with integrated security. The results of this survey show that 72% of respondents want next-generation firewalls built into SD-WAN products, and 61% want anti-malware technology built into SD-WAN products.