Next generation networks like SD-WAN are key to realizing the full potential of Organization’s Cloud and Digital strategy

With 42% of businesses in India experiencing various types of Cloud related network issues due to legacy infrastructure, it’s not surprising that an astounding 98% of the Indian respondents from the Riverbed Future of Networking Global Survey 2017,agree that legacy network infrastructure will have difficulty keeping pace with the changing demands of the Cloud and Hybrid networks. The survey identified that software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) can go long way in preparing a Organization for realizing the full potential from their Cloud and Digital transformation projects.

The Survey found that about 92% of the Survey respondents have a plan to migrate to SD-WAN within the next four years. “This survey and the resulting data reveal the tremendous pressure that IT decision makers in India and globally are under to execute their cloud strategies, achieve digital transformation and keep pace with the speed of innovation that is the norm in today’s hypercompetitive markets,” said Bjorn Engelhardt, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific & Japan, Riverbed Technology.  The survey also highlighted that a clear majority of the respondents acknowledge that the Legacy networks cannot support the needs of the Cloud applications. Indian IT decision makers see a variety of benefits coming from SD-WAN. About 40% of respondents felt that new networks will increase application performance. Another 50% would like to automate the Network operations and desire to have an option to prioritize applications running on the Network.  About 43% of the respondents feel that a Next generation network would be able to truly unify the Enterprise-wide network. An equal percentage of respondents felt that a unified network would allow end to end network visibility and monitoring and at the same time make the management of the network easy.

A next generation network like SD-WAN is also expected to be more secure than the legacy networks. About 29% of the Survey respondents claimed that their Network operating costs would come down after replacing the legacy network with SD-WAN. Among other positive outcomes surveyed by Riverbed, about 47% of the Indian IT decision makers felt that SD-WAN would lead to better use of bandwidth and 55% felt that a next generation network would increase the organization’s productivity.

The Riverbed Future of Networking Global Survey 2017 also identified the factors driving the businesses to move to next generation networks. An overwhelming 60% of Indian respondents acknowledge that “Operational Agility” is critical to success of a modern enterprise. Some of the other top factors driving adoption of modern networks are,

1) Successfully achieving digital transformation initiatives 2) movement towards cloud and hybrid networks 3) growing need for mobility 4) rising customer and end user expectations 5) Support for IoT devices.

In summary, the Survey also highlights that a clear majority of IT Decision makers are looking forward to improving their visibility in Cloud. Riverbed Technology has a product line that provides greater visibility into the Cloud and some key metrics into the performance of their Cloud based applications and insights into the data stored on the Cloud. Indian IT decision makers realize that they have to look at next generation networking solutions like SD-WAN to improve the visibility into their Cloud applications over and above the information and control workflows provided by the Cloud providers like AWS and MS Azure.