News

Survey: Growing SD-WAN Adoption Slowed by Cost Concerns, Skills Gap

• By David Ramel
• 07/17/2019

Although the software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) movement has taken the point position in the penetration of new-age, software-defined networking (SDN) into the enterprise, it has been slowed by cost concerns and a skills gap, says a new study.

Sponsored by SD-WAN vendor Masergy and conducted by IDG Research, the new 2019 SD-WAN Market Trends Survey finds that despite those barriers, SD-WAN adoption is rising, with improved security a primary driver.

The May 2019 survey was combined with results from a similar July 2017 survey to reveal trends over time. Key findings from the 2019 survey include:

• Optimizing the network to support cutting-edge technologies remains the top WAN objective (61 percent) among survey participants.
• Security (50 percent) is the top WAN challenge and the leading factor (81 percent) guiding companies in the SD-WAN selection process.
• The skills gap (46 percent) remains a top barrier to SD-WAN adoption, whereas concerns regarding interoperability with existing WANs are less prevalent than they were two years ago.
• SD-WAN adoption rates increased from 35 percent to 54 percent over the past two years, with 90 percent of respondents’ actively researching, piloting, actively using or upgrading SD-WAN.
• Network management simplification (46 percent) continues to be the top expected IT benefit of SD-WAN adoption, and the top three expected business benefits of SD-WAN are increased efficiency, improved security, and cost savings.
• Increased efficiency, improved security, and cost savings are more often cited as expected business benefits of SD-WAN when compared to the 2017 survey
• Respondents place less importance on centralized policy and configuration management when researching SD-WAN solutions today (44 percent, down from 58 percent in 2017), while continuing to look for solutions that offer secure local Internet connectivity (52 percent) and cloud connectivity (48 percent).
• Confidence in WAN architecture to support future goals has grown since 2017, with 68 percent in the May 2019 survey reporting they are extremely or very confident.
• When compared to the July 2017 survey, there is a slight increase in the percent indicating SD-WAN will complement (39 percent) or replace (11 percent) existing WAN services. Smaller organizations more frequently report they will replace existing WAN services (19 percent vs. 2 percent among larger enterprises).

The new survey was conducted via an online questionnaire from May 1 through May 8, with qualified respondents required to work in an IT-related function at manager level or above for a private sector organization with 500 or more employees. The new survey had 100 qualified completes, compared to 103 in the July 2017 survey.