Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 50 | Page 20

LATEST INTELLIGENCE UNDERSTANDING THE OBSTACLES TO WAN TRANSFORMATION SECURITY, PERFORMANCE, AND TCO E Executive Summary PRESENTED BY Network engineering and operations leaders are looking to replace their traditional wide-area network (WAN) architectures with software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN) in order to support the ever-increasing traffic demands (and associated connectivity costs) that come with digital innovation (DI). These DI-driven initiatives improve staff productivity and create new business opportunities. Yet, they also impact networking performance and ratchet up security concerns. SD-WAN adoption is accelerating and many organizations have embarked on SD-WAN implementations. But many SD- WAN solutions present serious challenges – from inadequate security to high total cost of ownership (TCO). Understanding these issues is key to navigating the increasingly complex market for WAN edge technologies. How DI Is Impacting Corporate Networks Download whitepaper here Distributed organizations are embracing a wide range of DI technologies. This includes adoption of Software-as-a- Service (SaaS) applications, cloud on-ramping connectivity, Voice over IP (VoIP) and video communications tools, use of DevOps to speed time deployment for new web applications, and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices for data collection and telemetry. However, these DI initiatives present new challenges for network engineering and operations leaders who must 20 INTELLIGENTCIO sustain both performance and security from the data-center campus to branch offices on the network edge. n www.intelligentcio.com