>
Nearly four months after the pandemic, companies are beginning to question the relevance of SD-WAN solutions to the remote workforce. According to a new report from Accelerate, half of UK companies view the technology as ‘less relevant’.
Instead, companies are leaning towards a single cloud (opens in new tab) SASE service model, which combines the features of SD-WAN with cloud-based security. According to Accelerate, companies believe that WAN optimization performs well enough and would rather go for centralized security and a single public access point.
Disadvantages of SD-WAN
Respondents who had no intention of deploying SD-WAN claimed that it does not support employee access (despite most organizations using SD-WAN say it does just that) and that it is too difficult to suitable technology partner or skilled people in-house.
Commenting on the findings, Director of Technologies at Accelerate Darran Clare said the shift in focus to SASE architectures is “natural.”
“We are also seeing concrete evidence that WAN optimization is far from dead, and such services could play a key role in improving the performance of cloud-hosted applications where latency is the underlying issue,” he said.
“While most SD WAN and SASE vendors will advertise WAN Op capabilities, such claims should not be taken lightly, as the scale and depth of application optimization can vary wildly.”
For most companies surveyed for the report, the top challenges are managing the performance and support of remote workers. Nearly half reported issues with bandwidth, infrastructure capacity, and the increased number of distributed and unmanaged devices.