Staying ahead of the SD-WAN curve: the cloud migration edition

Where exactly is SD-WAN heading?

In these times of confinement and teleworking, it is comforting to see that the companies that were well into their cloud migration strategies are the ones that have reacted with the most agility and success to current circumstances. It is certainly a justification for the years of investment and IT transformations that have now essentially delivered what was promised.

The success was achieved when millions of workers logged in from home over their personal Internet Service Provider (ISP) links and accessed the cloud applications over this more often than not “best-effort” service. Although some initial speculations in early April were that the Internet would break, it did no such thing.

Not to say there weren’t a few small bumps in the road, but overall, service providers were able to scale the network, and in many cases in North America, even waived capacity limits. In some areas, the access has slowed down, but nothing actually broke. Likewise, cloud application providers were also quick to react and adapt to new load levels.  

The pandemic and the implication it has on SD-WAN

To be quite frank, not that many implications. With the branch offices deserted due to confinement, all the dedication and service quality-oriented SD-WAN solutions deployed there were essentially idle.  

The network and application-level adaptations to the pandemic were done by monitoring and instrumentation implemented at the service provider and cloud provider levels. Those with the best instrumentation delivered the best service. SD-WAN instrumentation at the branches, being mostly out of the loop, could not contribute to service level adjustments. More importantly, SD-WAN instrumentation did not need to contribute; we got along just fine without it.

Different flavors of the SD-WAN market

So where does this leave SD-WAN exactly? It started as a promise of open software-defined network and ubiquitous function virtualization. The SDN and NFV initiatives latched onto it like their first concrete offering (one might argue, like a lifeboat). What ended up in the market was a proprietary package from a few vendors on controlled hardware footprints. 

And the market’s verdict is… positive! SD-WAN has been achieving high volumes of sales and has seen good growth. SD-WAN vendors have been delivering exactly what customers had been asking for: a single box combining multiple access links and security functions that reduce costs and footprint at the branch. One must agree, however, that this market is very specific to a current user/network deployment pattern and, already before the pandemic, the market was starting to ask “what’s next”?

Here’s what will happen that nobody is talking about: SD-WAN “on-premises” or redoubling cloud migration efforts

With the pandemic pushing workers away from the branch, one must wonder if the workers will be coming back or at least, coming back with the same numbers. Perhaps a prelude to this is reflected in recent SD-WAN webinars showing how these vendors helped their customers move to teleworking for in-house applications. In these cases, the solution was to convert the worker’s home into a mini-branch office and deploy SD-WAN hardware on-premises. 

Although this is a great testament to an SD-WAN vendor’s flexibility, long-term one must wonder if such an approach can scale. Indeed, customers that needed to fall back to such a solution may want to look into putting their in-house applications in the cloud instead of having to manage additional hardware at their employees’ homes.

If anything, the post-pandemic market will see an acceleration of cloud-based initiatives. On that front, even before our confinement, several service providers were arranging for dedicated interconnects with the larger cloud providers. This essentially brings the traffic that was going over the Internet back to the service provider with guaranteed SLAs all the way to the cloud provider.

Dedicated circuit anyone? Why have multiple links to a cloud application when you can have an SLA to access it via your service provider? 

Combined with our forced, yet successful, large-scale “teleworking experiment” one must wonder if the “WAN” is being squeezed out of SD-WAN.    

What lies ahead for SD-WAN?

SD-WAN is in somewhat of a predicament: it is facing pressure from service providers trying to recapture the data path, from a branch deployment model that needs to scale, from an SDN/NFV promise that it has yet to fully honor, and from a market whose shift has been accelerated by COVID-19.   

Vendors have not been idle and are already enhancing the agility and scale of their offer with investments into microservices (vSphere 7 and Kubernetes) and more focus on “white-box” deployments. These changes will drive products that are more “open” for microservices with a bigger focus on one area they have been less challenged: security and content management. 

This focus on security has even resulted in a new term: enter SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) which was recently coined by Gartner as a combination of network security functions and WAN interconnect. The new name focuses on the security aspect and not so much the WAN. So where is SD-WAN headed? Perhaps, a new name and a nice little reboot.

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