Network

Enterprise IT professionals are turning to managed services for their SD-WAN deployments. At the same time, a new Cato Networks survey finds legacy telco services inadequately address customer expectations around speed, agility, and overall value.

“The digital business demands a faster, more agile network to drive growth and compete effectively in the marketplace. Legacy telcos rely on rigid, fragmented, and expensive bundles of point solutions — an approach incompatible with the digital business. To support digital business transformation, IT needs networks that are natively built with the global reach, self-service, and agility of the cloud,” says Shlomo Kramer, CEO of Cato Networks.

SD-WAN alone cannot address the networking challenges confronting the digital business, pushing respondents to source SD-WANs through service providers:

• Nearly half of respondents (44%) indicated that they had or were considering deploying SD-WAN within the next 12 months. Last year the number was just over a quarter of respondents.
• The overwhelming majority of respondents (85%) indicated they would be confronting networking use cases in 2019 ignored or addressed poorly by SD-WAN.
• 3 out of 4 respondents are sourcing SD-WAN through service providers. Providers are generally better equipped to integrate SD-WAN with other solutions to address broader IT challenges.

Security is essential to WAN transformation and must be considered together with any SD-WAN acquisition:

• 1 in 2 respondents will need to provide secure Internet access from any location.
• Defending against malware/ransomware (70%) and enforcing corporate security policies on mobile users (49%) are respondents’ primary security challenges.
• Nearly half of respondents (45%) pointed to the “cost of buying and managing security appliances and software” as a major security challenge.

With IT tasked with delivering a superb user experience, cost reduction is no longer the primary motivation for SD-WAN:

• Only 1 in 3 respondents indicated that their motivation for purchasing SD-WAN was to address excessive WAN-related costs.
• The highest ranked motives for SD-WAN involved improving Internet access (46%), followed by the need for additional bandwidth (39%) and improved last-mile availability (38%).

Read More from helpnetsecurity.com