SD-WAN infrastructure and services revenues will see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 69.6 percent and reach $8.05 billion in 2021, said IDC.
Digital transformation (DX) projects with the deployment of cloud, big data and analytics, mobility, and social business will drive SD-WAN growth over the next five years.
Enterprise CIOs will be earmarking funds for SD-WAN infrastructure and services to support digital transformation projects because DX generally increases network workloads and elevates the network’s end-to-end importance to business operations.
The rise of public cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications throughout the enterprise disrupts the prominence of MPLS-based WAN connectivity to the branch will be another top factor driving the growth of SD-WAN.
CIOs are leveraging SD-WAN to provide dynamic connectivity optimization and path selection in a policy-driven, centrally manageable distributed network architecture.
The growth in SD-WAN will benefit from the broader acceptance, and adoption, of software-defined networking (SDN) throughout the enterprise. As virtualization, cloud management, and SDN continue to gain traction throughout enterprise networks, SD-WAN will benefit from this paradigm shift and receive increasing consideration.
“Traditional WANs were not architected for the cloud and are poorly suited to security requirements associated with distributed and cloud-based applications. While hybrid WAN emerged to meet some of these next-generation connectivity challenges, SD-WAN builds on hybrid WAN to offer a more complete solution,” said Rohit Mehra, vice president, Network Infrastructure at IDC.
