A year ago, it wasn’t difficult to predict that SD-WAN would continue to be a strategic component in the digital transformation of enterprises across most vertical markets. The drivers were obvious: moving corporate applications to public or hybrid cloud; the shift from branch-centric to cloud-centric networking; the need to support ‘any-to-any’ traffic patterns, both inside and outside the enterprise perimeter; and supporting continued rapid growth in traffic with restricted budgets.
Throughout 2020, SD-WAN has continued its rapid growth in adoption as enterprises have realized the importance of a software-defined infrastructure for all the reasons mentioned, but also the unforeseen impact of most employees being forced to work from home for health and safety reasons. As the year draws to a close, many companies are continuing to adapt to this ‘new normal’ and many are preparing for an extended or even permanent large-scale remote workforce.