SD-WAN Market, Products Mature

SD-WAN adoption continues to grow and solutions in this category continue to become more full-featured. According to IHS (News - Alert) Markit, revenue from SD-WAN appliance and control and management software totaled $147 million in the fourth quarter.

“Reviewing recent wins, we can see a market that is maturing with a transition from early market adopters to mainstream buyers,” said Cliff Grossner, Senior Research Director and Advisor for the Cloud and Data Center Research Practice at IHS Markit. “Other signs of maturation include expansions at existing clients and incremental product offerings such as security and WAN optimization on top of basic WAN transport virtualization.”

Indeed, several SD-WAN solution suppliers in recent months have added new security functionality to their offerings, either using homegrown technologies and/or via partnerships with companies that specialize in security. That said, it’s important for companies shopping for SD-WAN solutions to include their security teams in their SD-WAN product selection and implementation.

In a recent blog, Versa Networks notes the importance of network segmentation, real-time monitoring and analytics, and integrated security to WAN architectures and to the Internet of Things.

“The correct SD-WAN solution can help organizations get a head start on their IoT security journey,” blogs Debarati Roy. “For example, while there are multiple SD-WAN solutions in the market today, Versa’s SD-WAN  is a multi-service, multi-tenant software platform built on cloud principles to deliver scale, segmentation, programmability and automation. It provides advanced networking and security in a single software services platform that software-defines the branch.”

Businesses and service providers looking to adopt SD-WAN technology should also select solutions that can test link quality and detect congestion or packet loss –not just flag outages; report on link reliability and quality; and leverage SD-WAN connectivity data and share it with help desks and support team for troubleshooting and network engineering purposes.