Business IT

The work-from-home models necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic are driving rapid adoption of SD-WAN solutions. By providing more flexible, scalable and reliable connectivity than traditional WAN architectures, SD-WAN improves access to corporate resources and cloud services for today’s distributed workforce. As organizations embrace remote work as a long-term strategy, SD-WAN has become an essential component of the corporate IT infrastructure.

Networking has historically been hardware-centric, with organizations deploying stacks of routers, switches and security appliances. The result is a highly complex environment that is managed manually on each device. Inflexible legacy network architectures make it difficult to implement new applications and services or scale the environment to meet changing demands.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated adoption of cloud applications and services to support remote operations.  According to new data from Synergy Research Group, spending on cloud services saw 28 percent year-over-year growth in the third quarter of 2020 alone — about three percentage points greater than would have been expected under normal circumstances.

The sudden shift to remote work models has revealed weaknesses in many corporate networks. In an IDC study of enterprise networking decision-makers conducted in May and June of 2020, 84 percent of respondents said employees are unable to access applications at least weekly due to network connectivity issues. More than half (51 percent) said employees cannot access applications multiple times a week, with 11 percent reporting that this problem occurs daily.