Enterprise Customers Upbeat about SD-WAN Technology

In an interactive event organized by Umbrella Infocare in association with Citrix to discuss the business benefits of SD-WAN technology, enterprise customers were clearly excited about its applicability—the advantages over traditional router-based WANs and challenges emerging from accessing public Cloud platforms.

Vikram Khanna, Lead Systems Engineer, Citrix set the tone for the evening by providing an overview of how SD-WAN simplifies network management for distributed enterprises. Shweta Negi Enterprise Account Manager, Umbrella Infocare provided insights into Umbrella capabilities.

Customers learnt about how SD-WAN solves some of the day-to-day enterprise challenges in connectivity issues, network performance, facilitating delivery of applications at branch offices while adhering to regulatory compliance and security best practices.

According to a study conducted by IDC, nearly 82% of IT leaders believe their organizations’ ability to migrate apps to the cloud is hindered by increasing complexity of network infrastructure. IDC predicts the SD WAN market to touch nearly USD 8 billion by 2021, experiencing exponential growth of nearly 70% between 2018 and 2021.

Some benefits that resonated with customers include the following:

• Link aggregation: Customers liked that SD-WAN allows to aggregate bandwidth connections for optimized capacity utilization as opposed to the current scenario where bandwidth may be lying idle in some connections while others may be choked with traffic.
• Easy roll out at branch offices: SD-WAN facilitates easy access to enterprise applications at branch locations even at remote locations where connectivity is a challenge by optimizing application delivery.
• Central security and compliance management: Governance and security policies can be set at the head office and managed centrally enforcing compliance and providing greater security for enterprise data.
• Quality of Service: SD-WAN helps ensure QoS for critical applications by prioritizing packets.
• Manage hybrid networks: SD-WAN improves enterprise capability to handle changing network traffic patterns resulting from cloud computing, new application architectures and hybrid WANs.

Not surprisingly Gartner predicts robust momentum with more than 50% of WAN edge infrastructure refresh initiatives based on SD-WAN versus traditional routers, up from less than 5% today.

Umbrella Infocare has helped many enterprises deploy SD-WAN across locations delivering significant benefits. Customers who have deployed SD-WAN across locations have accelerated digital transformation by optimizing enterprise bandwidth connectivity; routing traffic in real-time; and increasing visibility into network traffic.