A recent survey of North American companies conducted by
IHS Markit found that nearly three-quarters of respondents conducted SD-WAN lab trials in the previous year. And many believe that this highlights the fact that businesses are concerned that their ever-increasing connectivity is also leaving them exposed to increasing security threats.
These concerns have merit. According to CenturyLink, networkd operators are sometimes seeing
hundreds of thousands of botnet threats each day. As a result, companies invested in SD-WAN are spending an average of $300,000 each on the technology.
“As companies shift a greater portion of their IT infrastructure into the cloud, and expand their physical presence to go after new markets or be closer to customers and partners, the need for reliable, secure and high-performance WAN and internet connectivity has never been greater,” Matthias Machowinski, senior research director for enterprise networks at IHS Markit, told
FierceTelecom.
“However, companies don’t have unlimited budgets to fund growing WAN bandwidth consumption, which is why a majority are planning to deploy software-defined WAN in the next three years, to better control how their WANs are used," he added.