SD-WAN Infrastructure Market to cross $5.25 Billion In 2023

SD WANs offer an entirely new way of managing a network across multiple locations. They are not dependent on hardware and can dynamically load balance across multiple links to avoid the backhauling that still plagues many traditional networks today. The biggest adopter of SD-WAN is the enterprise networking market, which will grow at a 30.8% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2018 to 2023 to reach $5.25 billion, according to IDC’s SD-WAN Infrastructure Forecast, as per IDC.

This functionality allows organizations to replace MPLS with an Internet-based option that can save money and increase employee productivity. If that sounds too good to be true, it’s not. Here’s a breakdown of how the process works:

“SD-WAN continues to be one of the fastest-growing segments of the network infrastructure market, driven by a variety of factors. Combined with the rapid embrace of SD-WAN by leading communications service providers globally, these trends continue to drive deployments of SD-WAN, providing enterprises with dynamic management of hybrid WAN connections and the ability to guarantee high levels of quality of service on a per-application basis.”

The SD-WAN infrastructure market continues to be highly competitive with sales increasing 64.9% in 2018 to $1.37 billion. Incumbent networking vendors have leveraged their technological strengths and installed bases in routing and WAN optimization sales to lead the market, while numerous start-ups remain active. IDC finds that Cisco holds the largest share of the SD-WAN infrastructure market, fueled by its extensive routing portfolio that is used in SD-WAN deployments, as well as its Meraki portfolio and its SD-WAN management platform powered by technology it acquired from Viptela in August 2017. VMware, with its SD-WAN service powered by VeloCloud (which VMware acquired in December 2017), holds the second largest market share in the SD-WAN infrastructure market, followed by Silver Peak, Nokia-Nuage, and Riverbed.

The SD-WAN infrastructure Market Share and Forecast reports do not include managed services related to SD-WAN, such as setup or operational support, nor do they include connectivity costs.

As great as all of that functionality sounds, nothing is perfect, and there are some disadvantages associated with SD WANs. In most cases, they only provide an advantage when accessing cloud-based applications. They do not provide any on-site security functionality.