Five Reasons Why It’s Time to Consider an SD-WAN Refresh

From bandwidth to consistency, there are a lot of reasons why an organization should consider SD-WAN over MPLS or the public Internet. With so many factors to consider, it can be tough to determine which option is going to be the best fit for an organization.

Our State of the WAN report aimed to cut through the noise and identify tangible trends and data that IT leaders can use to make informed decisions for their companies.

From that report, here are the top five reasons why it might be time to consider making the leap to global SD-WAN:

1. Increased Traffic and Volume

The volume of enterprise traffic is growing rapidly across all global regions and verticals. Data is exploding worldwide, driven by Big Data, the Internet of Things (IoT), and video; the proliferation of network-attached and wireless devices; virtualization; and the adoption of both public and private cloud delivery models.

We found that the largest growth regionally in Asia-Pacific and across verticals is in the manufacturing industry. However, it’s only a matter of time before the growth seen here expands to other sectors and other parts of the world.

2. Cloud Takeover

Nearly 50 percent of enterprise traffic is a combination of HTTP and HTTPS as applications move from being hosted on-site to being hosted in the cloud.

No matter how an enterprise might feel about the cloud, it’s no longer possible to avoid it. Employees demand the flexibility of accessing information no matter where they are, and the ability to collaborate with colleagues around the world in a global enterprise.

As cloud applications continue to grow in popularity, it will be increasingly difficult for MPLS to keep up without sacrificing user productivity and satisfaction in the process.

3. Global Bandwidth

This is one area where enterprise WAN is holding up fairly well. Bandwidth at non-headquarters enterprise sites is reasonably good worldwide. Globally, only about 12 percent of global enterprises have links with bandwidth less than 10 Mbps, which is more than a 50 percent decrease from last year.

However, just because something isn’t failing doesn’t mean an organization should accept the status quo. There is always room for improvement. About 25 percent of Aryaka’s customers have one or more 100 Mbps links. Even in developing countries, access-site bandwidth is never below 2 Mbps.

4. Distance and Response Times

As more and more organizations become global, components of traditional enterprise WAN are holding them back from reaching their full potential while conducting business online.

The biggest challenge comes in connecting long distances across the globe. TCP application response times can be as high as 40 seconds and have a variation of nearly 200 percent depending on the distance between the sites.

The problem only becomes worse as the distance increases. This is a trend that’s not going to reverse as more and more organizations become global enterprises.

5. Application Consistency

In some parts of the world, inconsistency in application response times is not solely caused by the sheer distance between locations. The network infrastructure itself also has a role to play.  cannot be solely attributed to the distance between locations but is also dependent on the network infrastructure itself.

This difference becomes apparent in most of the Middle East and some parts of Asia, where the average response time is around 1 second can vary by more than 150 percent.

All of those seconds add up to decreased employee productivity, and the inconsistency can also wreak havoc on an organization’s bottom line over time.

A Truly Global Solution

These trends show that today’s enterprise is encountering major networking and communications challenges as it tries to keep up with the scale and dynamic nature of cloud connectivity, including connecting mobile users across the globe.

Dynamic SD-WAN and SD-WAN NaaS are a way to solve that. Read our white paper on SD-WAN vs. MPLS for more information on the challenges facing global enterprises and how Aryaka’s global SD-WAN can help solve them.