Ever Adaptable, SD-WAN Continues to Be Driving Force in Networking

By Jonathan Tinner, GTT

Today's organizations are facing two major networking challenges: increases in the volume and diversity of application traffic, and the demands of mobile workforces. A growing reliance on cloud applications has caused data flows toward the public internet to grow relative to WAN traffic. Meanwhile, the shift to remote and hybrid-remote work continues to create challenges in ensuring reliable and secure connectivity from anywhere.

Consequently, more and more businesses are exploring and adopting solutions that can offer them the improved network operation they need to boost worker productivity, enhance customer experiences, and improve overall operational efficiency. Increasingly, they're turning to software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), which continues to demonstrate remarkable adaptability in addressing the many networking challenges threatening to impede a business's ability to deliver.

According to Gartner® forecasts earlier this year, SD-WAN will experience a 16.8% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2027. GTT's own study conducted by Hanover Research shows deployments are currently driven mostly by the need to optimize network connections to cloud-based applications (86%) and improve overall security posture (81%), which underscores the strategic importance of SD-WAN for businesses today.

Related:SD-WAN and SASE: Collaboration and Standards are Essential

A Tale of Two Deployment Drivers: Connectivity and Security

SD-WAN is a cloud-centric wide area network (WAN) architecture that provides secure, real-time network traffic management with centrally managed user-defined control policies and separation of applications from underlying network infrastructure. It allows businesses across industries to efficiently and reliably connect users and offices to critical cloud applications, IoT devices, edge sites, and more.

In retail, for example, SD-WAN brings a blend of intelligent traffic management and high-speed connectivity to bear, enabling simultaneous deployment of point-of-sale (POS) systems, digital signage, in-store camera, and other systems that contribute to rich in-store experiences. Avoiding the need to indiscriminately backhaul traffic through corporate data centers means faster, simpler, and more reliable internet connectivity across the board, which also supports the rapid ramp-up of new branch locations. The manufacturing industry, meanwhile, increasingly depends on SD-WAN's reliable, high-quality network and options for cloud connectivity to support the intelligent devices currently reshaping factory floors.

But SD-WAN also plays a crucial role in its convergence with advanced security, as championed by the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) framework, which integrates cloud-based security (Security Service Edge, or SSE) and SD-WAN into a comprehensive solution. This creates a unified approach to network and security management in the defense against DDoS attacks, man-in-the-middle, malware, and a host of other threats. 

In healthcare, that means delivering secure and reliable access to electronic health records across hospitals, clinics, and remote sites while ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations — such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the U.S. — which it does by providing segmentation and encryption of sensitive patient data over the WAN. For banks, SD-WAN enables the secure execution of transactions by protecting data in transit between branches, ATMs, and data centers. And by providing banks with built-in network segmentation capabilities, SD-WAN can provide an additional layer of separation between customer-facing applications and internal banking systems, adding another layer of defense against the risk of data breaches.

Evolving with the Times

SD-WAN has proved remarkably able to integrate with multiple new technologies that have emerged to address various challenges, needs, and trends in modern networking. SD-WAN's native automation capabilities in particular have enabled significant advancements, including automated traffic steering, real-time threat detection/remediation, dynamic overlay creation, and zero-touch provisioning, which simplifies network management and security while reducing the misconfigurations caused by human error. AI is also increasingly being applied to SD-WAN to enable intelligent parsing of performance data to generate meaningful insights and recommendations.

Looking ahead, SD-WAN is expected to continue its progression by integrating newer AI capabilities. Gartner predicts that generative AI will be used for 20% of initial SD-WAN network configurations by 2026, up from nearly none in 2023. 5G connectivity merged with SD-WAN is also expected to bring a greater universality of high bandwidth, lower latency, security, and improved quality of experience to enterprise applications while enabling the rapid deployment of new branch offices, retail and manufacturing locations, and other distributed, rural, and otherwise hard-to-reach sites.

As a proven, constantly evolving architecture, SD-WAN has earned its place as a critical enabler not just of enterprise networks, but of an enterprise's ability to empower its employees, better serve its customers, and improve its competitiveness. SD-WAN will continue to be a force driving the evolution of networking forward.

About the author:

Jonathan Tinner is Product Manager, SD-WAN and Security, at GTT.