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  • Survey Predicts Massive Migration to the Cloud

    Survey Predicts Massive Migration to the Cloud

    A global survey of 1,600 enterprise IT decision-makers found more than half are working for organizations that plan to eliminate the use of data centers over the next two years.

    The survey was conducted by Aryaka, a provider of a secure access service edge (SASE) platform, and found a quarter of the respondents have closed 25% to 50% of their office sites; 75% of respondents said at least a quarter of their employees will remain remote permanently post-pandemic. Just under a third (32%) expect at least half of their workforce would be permanently remote.

    Despite the apparent accelerated shift to the cloud, the report found a full three-quarters of respondents (75%) are projecting at least a 10% growth in IT spending, with a quarter expecting IT budgets to grow 25% or more. Nevertheless, more than a third (36%) report they have IT cost concerns.

    David Ginsburg, vice president of product and solutions for Aryaka, said the shift to the cloud in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic is being driven mainly by digital business transformation initiatives that require applications be quickly built and managed by IT teams that are working from home themselves. With the pandemic entering the third year, a hybrid workforce that regularly shifts between home and the office is now permanent, he noted.

    Consequently, with more people working from home, nearly two-thirds of respondents (64%) said they will shift toward a SASE-based approach over the course of the coming year to provide secure access to cloud applications over a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN). Over two-thirds of those respondents said they will opt for a managed SASE offering rather than build and maintain these platforms themselves.

    SASE was originally coined by Gartner to describe a cloud-delivered service that brought together networking and security offerings. Those offerings should include a firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS), secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB) and zero-trust network access (ZTNA). In effect, it’s a secure software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN). As organizations adopt SASE-based platforms and services, just under a third of respondents (61%) are recognizing that dynamic bandwidth reallocation will be a very important requirement as workers shift between the office and home.

    The transition to SASE involves setting a strategy (35%), phasing out of legacy virtual private networks (32%) and consolidating cloud security with zero-trust (29%). Top desired capabilities include SWG (47%), SD-WAN (36%) and FWaaS (28%). A full 41% reported that responsibility for networking and security decisions have now been consolidated into a single team. However, only slightly more than a third (34%) said security is a major priority.

    The implications of a shift to the cloud at this rate and level of scale are likely to have a profound impact on DevOps teams. While cloud infrastructure is designed to scale on demand, accessing applications across an SD-WAN can have a significant impact on application performance. The survey, however, finds only 29% of respondents are concerned about whether applications will perform properly. Nevertheless, well over two-thirds (69%) said there will be an increased focus on observability and control, while 42% noted identifying slow performance for remote and mobile users will be a key issue and 37% expected slow performance at the branch office to also be an issue. Lackluster application performance is a time sink, according to 42% of respondents.

    Naturally, many IT teams will add new tools and platforms to deploy and manage cloud applications. The Aryaka survey found that only slightly more than a quarter of respondents are concerned about the newness of the technology they might employ.

    The coming year is shaping up to be incredibly disruptive to the IT landscape. The challenge is making sure balance is maintained between cost, flexibility and application performance.

  • Aryaka’s Fourth Annual State of the WAN Report Reveals 2020 Insights From 1000+ Global Enterprises

    Top Issues Include WAN Complexity, SD-WAN Adoption and Migration to Managed Services; Future Plans Include AI/ML, 5G and IoT Adoption 

     

    SAN MATEO, Calif. – April 22, 2020 – Aryaka®, the Cloud-First WAN company delivering the #1 managed SD-WAN solution, today published its fourth annual 2020 State of the WAN report that reveals application performance, impacted by network complexity at the edge and in the cloud, is the key enterprise concern this year for organizations implementing SD-WAN.

    “Modern applications are being distributed across on premises data centers, multiple public clouds (IaaS & SaaS) and edge locations. This is creating more complexity and greater dependency on the network to ensure optimal application performance as confirmed by the Aryaka report,” said Bob Laliberte, Sr. Analyst and Practice Director at ESG.  “Organizations need WAN solutions that deliver performance, flexibility and simplicity to overcome that complexity. This is driving interest in managed SD-WAN offerings that combine application optimization and secure connectivity, to any location, from any location, including access and support for remote workers.”

    Study Methodology

    The Fourth Annual Global Aryaka 2020 State of the WAN study surveyed over one thousand global IT and network practitioners at enterprise organizations across all verticals, headquartered in NA, APAC and EMEA. The survey asked respondents about their networking and performance challenges, priorities and their plans for 2020 and beyond.

    Complexity and Application Performance Play a Large Role in SD-WAN Selection Criteria

    Enterprise complexity at the edge and within the cloud are creating a challenging environment for IT organizations. IT managers identify complexity and slow performance of both on-prem and cloud-based applications as their biggest concerns. Complexity (37 percent) replaces cost as the number one concern, followed by slow on-prem performance (32 percent) and slow access to cloud and software as a service (SaaS) apps (32 percent). Security (31 percent) and long deployment times (30 percent) are also in the top four.

    With so many applications in use, many of which are cloud-based, IT is consumed by managing application performance and access to the cloud.  And it’s only getting more complex, highlighting the need for a managed service for many organizations. The biggest IT time consuming issues identified by respondents were remote and mobile (47 percent), application performance at the branch (43 percent) and accessing the cloud, which doubled from 20 percent in 2019 to 42 percent in 2020.

    Challenges Surrounding Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)

    This year’s survey showed that while network managers have high expectations as performance, UCaaS is still challenging to deploy globally, and, once again, complexity is the culprit. Respondents identified set-up and management as the number one challenge for voice and video (48 percent in 2020; 27 percent in 2019), highlighting the need for managed solutions that hide the complexity. Lag/delay was a close second (43 percent in 2020; 30 percent in 2019), which illustrates network performance issues. This was followed by dropped calls (39 percent).

    It’s All About the Apps and Where They’re Connecting From

    Most of the enterprises surveyed this year are leveraging over 10 SaaS applications (51 percent in 2020 versus 23 percent in 2019), which speaks to the criticality of cloud performance. In terms of where these SaaS apps are hosted, it’s a multi-cloud world, with AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, Oracle, and Alibaba Cloud all well represented. What’s more, enterprises are continuing to increase the number of applications deployed. A growing number of companies are deploying 100+ applications: 59 percent in 2020 compared to 43 percent in 2019.  Please refer to the report for more detailed, per-vertical data and year-on-year comparisons.

    What’s Being Done to Reduce Complexity

    To address increased complexity and the time spent managing the WAN, enterprises regardless of size are undergoing major initiatives that include automation, the cloud and newer areas of interest such as internet of things (IoT), AI/ML and blockchain. For broad IT initiatives, automation grew substantially to 41 percent of respondents in 2020 from only 31 percent in 2019, as did IoT (29 percent in 2020 from 18 percent in 2019), AI/ML (27 percent in 2020 from 12 percent in 2019), and blockchain (21 percent in 2020 from only five percent in 2019).

    On the cloud front, regardless of company size, upgrades and management are important as well as a keen interest in 5G. This last initiative reflects the interest in 5G as a future primary connectivity option for SD-WAN. Respondents identified cloud upgrades (37 percent) and management (38 percent) as top networking initiatives. A whopping 42 percent of respondents also named 5G as a top initiative for this year.

    Barriers and Expectations for Today’s SD-WANs

    Buyers are at various stages of their SD-WAN evaluation, but most are still gathering information or evaluating vendors. Forty-four percent of respondents are gathering information, 23 percent are evaluating SD-WAN vendors, 11 percent are building a business case, 13 percent are in the middle of deploying, six percent have deployed and assumed to be happy while only two percent are deployed, but not happy.

    When evaluating SD-WAN, the top three potential barriers include application performance, knowledge gaps and complexity.  Overall, cost seems less a consideration this year versus performance and complexity, with SD-WAN ROI better understood and valued than in previous years.

    Beyond the barriers mentioned above, SD-WAN planners have certain expectations they’d like met. Respondents said, the cloud and WAN optimization are still key requirements to a successful SD-WAN solution, but NFV, support for remote workers and the desire for a managed service have grown substantially. Add in security, and all of these features illustrate the many moving parts critical to a successful SD-WAN deployment. Their top SD-WAN features wish lists included expected responses such as security, cloud and WAN optimization, but also network functions virtualization (NFV), which more than doubled from 2019 (35 percent in 2020 from 13 percent in 2019) and support for remote employees, which also grew by over 50 percent (33 percent in 2020 from 21 percent in 2019).  Organizations are increasingly expecting the mobile workforce to be included as part of the total SD-WAN solution.

    The desire for a fully managed SD-WAN also increased to 37 percent in 2020 from 28 percent in 2019.  This aligns with a growing acceptance for managed offerings, likely in response to the increasing complexities and challenges detailed earlier, with 87 percent of respondents saying they would consider a managed SD-WAN as compared to 59 percent in 2019.

    “We are living in a complex multi-cloud and multi-SaaS application world. As global enterprises continue to innovate by embracing new technologies and migrating to the cloud, they also face new challenges, and the network is increasingly a strategic asset” said Shashi Kiran, CMO of Aryaka. “Whether it’s an increasing number of global sites through expansion, poor performing cloud-based applications, increasing costs or the time it takes to manage multiple vendors, many organizations are at an inflection point: transform the WAN now or risk falling behind and losing out to competitors.”

    Aryaka to Host 2020 The State of the WAN Webinar

    Join us at the following dates/times for a lively panel discussion on the “Aryaka 2020 Global State of the WAN,” where we also present regional observations:

    • North America            April 29, 11am EST, 8am PST              Register Here
    • EMEA                          April 30, 10am GMT                            Register Here
    • APAC                           April 30, 1030am IST, 2pm Tokyo       Register Here

    This interactive format will allow our panel of experts to deep dive into our 4th annual State of the WAN report, with further analysis of the key findings driving digital transformation.

    Download these assets to plan your WAN for 2020

    Aryaka 4th Annual Global State of the WAN Ebook

    Aryaka 4th Annual Global State of the WAN Infographic

    Aryaka’s State of the WAN 2021 Survey is Now Open

    To respond and receive a copy of the results, click  here for more information.

    For more on Aryaka, please visit: https://www.aryaka.com/

    Visit the Aryaka blog: https://www.aryaka.com/blog/

    Follow Aryaka on Twitter: @AryakaNetworks

    Visit Aryaka on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aryaka-networks/

    About Aryaka

    Aryaka, the Cloud-First WAN company, brings agility, simplicity and a great experience to consuming the WAN-as-a-service. An optimized global network and innovative technology stack delivers the industry’s #1 managed SD-WAN service and sets the gold standard for application performance. Aryaka’s SmartServices platform offers connectivity, application acceleration, security, cloud networking and insights, leveraging global orchestration and provisioning. The company’s customers include hundreds of global enterprises including several in the Fortune 100.