Wednesday, May 29, 2019

SD-WAN Interest Seemingly Jumps in 1 Year

About 46 percent of information technology executives surveyed by Cato Networks indicated that they had, or were considering, deploying SD-WAN in 12 months, up from about 25 percent with such intentions in 2018.

Another 33 percent of respondents are considering SD-WAN but have no current plans to deploy the technology.

The primary motivations for considering SD-WAN include:
  • Improved Internet access (46 percent)
  • bandwidth (39 percent)
  • improved last-mile availability (38 percent)
  • excessive WAN related costs (37 percent).

As argued by Cato Networks, the advantages of SD-WAN over MPLS include:
  • Secure, direct Internet access from branch offices
  • Predictable, responsive global application performance without
  • Lower cost than MPLS
  • Easy and affordable optimized cloud access
  • Optimized and secure mobile experience worldwide

But connectivity providers (telcos) still seem to face mixed reviews from enterprise users.
Respondents said  telcos provide “average service level.”

“There is nothing about our telco which makes us like or dislike them, they are just ‘as expected,’” Cato Networks summarizes.

On a numerical ranking, telcos got ratings of 54 out of 100, when respondents were asked if they thought network service pricing was fair.

On other measures telcos arguably scored better. Respondents gave high marks for the overall
experience with cloud providers (3.71 for cloud application providers, 3.70 for cloud datacenter providers), while global telcos scored 3.24.

Cato Networks calls that performance by cloud service suppliers “high,” while telcos scored “lowest.” It is not possible for me to determine how significant those differences are, as Cato did not provide the range of possible scores. I would guess the range was 1 to 5. In that case, though telcos scored lower, the difference between cloud providers and telcos, while clear, might not be a gulf.

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