Frost & Sullivan : Prepare Your WAN for a Cloud-centric World: How SD-WAN Makes the Difference

The impact of cloud computing on enterprise data centers is clear. In the 2019 Frost & Sullivan Global Cloud survey, 54% of IT decision-makers agreed with the statement, “The cloud is the most critical part of our digital transformation strategy.” The traditional wide area network (WAN) architecture—with the traffic back hauled to headquarters locations before reaching the end user—does not work for the current cloud-centric era. Thanks to software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) technology, the enterprise WAN can now transform to be more cloud- and user-friendly, ensuring anytime, anywhere access to enterprise applications.

All technology trends of priority to enterprises today—network and application security, unified communication and collaboration, Internet of Things (IoT), Big data and analytics, to list a few—are intertwined with the cloud; such applications are either hosted in the cloud or integrated with other business applications in the cloud. As cloud becomes an integral part of your business’s digital transformation strategy, you need to update your WAN to ensure a successful cloud strategy. In this paper, we look at the value SD-WAN offers to enterprises and key trends driving adoption of SD-WAN.