TeleGeography has revealed that 43% of enterprises surveyed had installed SD-WAN in 2020, compared to just 18% in 2018. Its WAN Manager Survey shows the accelerating adoption of SD-WAN and enterprise networking trends across the globe.
According to the survey, increasing site capacity and using alternative access solutions are key motivators for WAN managers pursuing SD-WAN, and 40% of respondents prefer a co-managed SD-WAN solution. On top of this, enterprises were running MPLS at an average of 71% of sites during the three year period of 2018-2020. MPLS use is, however, on the decline, with the average network having MPLS at only 58% of sites in 2020, compared to 82% in 2018.
DIA was found to be the key underlay product for larger capacity sites, and more than one-quarter of DIA sites were larger than 100 Mbps.
In response to COVID-19, 85% of enterprises reported that the majority of their workforce were working remotely at some stage. The key challenges faced by WAN managers at the onset of the pandemic were congestion at internet gateways from the influx of remote users, paired with the performance of at-home broadband.
TeleGeography’s WAN Manager Survey offers in-depth analysis based on the experiences of WAN managers from 125 companies. The companies represented in the survey had a median revenue of $10 billion, with a range of IT managers covering the designing, sourcing, and managing of U.S. national, regional, and global corporate wide area computer networks.