ChannelVision Magazine

That doesn’t necessarily mean everyone is happy with MPLS, though. In fact, according to Dave Greenfield, a secure networking evangelist at Cato and longtime industry veteran, most businesses are looking for other options — de- spite the fact they are continuing to invest in MPLS. “Every organization today that runs a major MPLS deployment is looking for an alternative,” he said. “Or they are at least open to an alternative. This is different from 12 to 24 months ago when SD-WAN was still a novelty. We’re still in the early days of SD-WAN. “There has been a lot of interest in moving off of MPLS or augment- ing it in one way or another,” Green- field continued. “[In the report] we took a deeper look at that and honed in on the area of simplification. With wide area networking, enterprises often complain about the complexity of running their networks.” In the Cato study, which fo- cused on organizations with MPLS as their backbone, nearly 50 percent of respondents said that simplifying network or security ar- chitectures will be a primary focus during the next 12 months — mak- ing it the most popular use case for SD-WAN in 2018. At the same time, 32 percent still see SD-WAN appliances as too complex, while 25 percent see SD-WAN services as too complex. As Greenfield pointed out, cus- tomers won’t always voice complexity concerns directly in conversation, but these concerns are very real. Cus- tomers may, for instance, mention pet peeves such as having to open trouble tickets with carriers instead of troubleshooting errors themselves. Or, they may balk at the thought of having to move from a centralized, secure architecture with a single in- ternet connection to one where every office has a unique one. “The complexity of today’s network, and the push for a sim- pler one, expresses itself in many ways,” the Cato report continues. “At times, IT professionals explicitly point to ‘complexity’ as a challenge. In other instances, complexity is implicit, such as when they express interest in ‘network automation’ or point to concerns around selecting, integrating and managing multiple tools and platforms.” Cato ultimately makes the mes- sage loud and clear in the report: If SD-WAN is to develop fully in 2018, the company says, and enable enterprises to truly transform their networks, then the complete, secure networking experience must become simpler and more seamless. SD-WAN providers that cannot offer a simplified and consolidated line of services are going to be in for a rude awakening. “If you’re a company that only delivers connectivity, or you only deliver SD-WAN, you have a real problem,” Greenfield said. “You are truly in a race against time. Cato is an example of how SD-WAN func- tionality is being packaged with ad- ditional capabilities for greater value. Firewall vendors are doing this, too.” “The fact is,” Greenfield contin- ued, “the pure SD-WAN industry is probably going away or becoming intertwined with other capabilities. As we look out into industry over the next 24 months, greater conver- gence will take place. Security and SD-WAN in particular are coming together in a closer and closer way.” The Cato model, Greenfield said, brings together data centers, as well as cloud data centers and applications and remote users into a single and unified network. “It’s a new kind of IP and en- terprise backbone that is much, much easier to manage and main- tain because it is one network,” Greenfield stated. “You don’t have separate networks, separate re- mote access solutions, a separate solution for the cloud or a separate solution for site-to-site connectiv- ity. You have one solution for all of them. Plus, our security services are baked into that.” o Primary networking challenges facing your IT organization Bandwidth costs 42% Equipment maintenance and updates 39% Performance between locations 38% Managing the network 35% Performance to the cloud 25% Providing and managing secure mobile/remote access 23% Last-mile availability 21% Finding and retaining skilled networking personnel 19% Time to deploy new locations 17% Source: Cato Networks Which of the following use cases will be a primary focus for your company during the next 12 months? Simplify network or security architectures 50% Provide secure internet access from any location 46% Integrate cloud datacenters into the WAN 36% Replace MPLS with a more affordable alternative with suitable performance 32% Improve visibility into and control over mobile access to cloud applications like Office 365 31% Decrease the time users want to access remote servers or transfer files 16% Eliminate appliances from branch offices 14% Other 7% Source: Cato Networks Zettabytes Channel Vision | July - August, 2018 26