By Martin Vilaboy Driven by competitive demands and largely enabled by the rise of software defined networking, enterprise WAN (wide area network) configurations have undergone a significant shift the last few years. The corporate WAN, suggest separate findings from TeleGeography and Gartner, is officially going “Internet-first.” Among global enterprises, for example, the rapid decrease in MPLS usage seems to have slowed a bit in 2022, shows TeleGeography data, but the average percentage of WAN sites using MPLS has dipped from more than 80 percent in 2018 to less than half the past two years. At the same time, dedicated internet access (DIA) has climbed from just more than a quarter of WAN sites in 2018 to around half by 2022. DIA and broadband links combine to deliver connectivity to about 60 percent of global enterprise WAN sites. Gartner, for its part, expects that by 2026, a full 45 percent of enterprise locations will use internet services exclusively for their WAN connectivity. “Growing interest in services like managed SD-WAN and SASE are Realities of an ‘internet-first’ WAN underlay MANAGING TRANSFORMATION 36 CHANNELV ISION | MARCH - APRIL 2023
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