“Use SDWAN is growing, especially through better security expectations.

More and more companies want to solve their various challenges for the management of their corporate networks by switching to an SD-WAN environment, Barracuda concludes in a recent global study. Achieving better security for the network infrastructure is the most important thing for this.

The study shows that many large business IT administrators around the world are facing network problems with their existing WAN configurations. Nearly half of the respondents said that these problems are due to the complexity of these environments, the performance of cloud services within the environments and the network performance.

In order to make the business environments more manageable, many companies are therefore switching to an SD WAN environment from the cloud. Almost half of the respondents did so last year.

Security main argument

Improving security is often the most important argument for switching to SD WAN. For a large majority of global respondents, advanced threat protection and centralized management are key, if not crucial, factors in the choice of moving to an SD WAN environment. They expect an SD WAN environment to provide them with better security at a lower cost.

Other benefits

Other benefits that companies want to realize with SD-WAN include better connectivity and more flexibility and scalability of their networks. Cost savings in general also appear to be an important argument. For example, almost half of them spend less thanks to SD-WAN. A little over a third of them indicate that they have been able to reduce the costs of using the WAN technology MPLS alone.

Dutch and Belgian situation

Data on the Netherlands and Belgium can also be obtained from the study. SD-WAN environments are also becoming increasingly popular with Dutch and Belgian companies. Almost one in three organisations surveyed indicated that they had already rolled out SDWAN in most of their branches. Half of the organisations surveyed are working on this or will be doing so next year.

Almost six out of ten companies in the Netherlands and Belgium state that security has the highest priority when choosing an SDWAN solution. Cost savings are also an important factor in making the switch. Respondents who are already using SDWAN estimate that they could save a total of almost 1.5 million euros on MPLS and WAN costs over a period of 12 months.

Finally, more than half of the Dutch and Belgian companies surveyed indicated that their competitive position would be at risk if they did not upgrade their current WAN to SD WAN.