More than half (51%) of UK-based CIOs plan to use software-defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) technologies to gain crucial visibility of local network traffic and application performance issues amid severe constraints on their IT staff and resources.
Insight from SD-WAN into applications’ branch-level performance is even more important to IT bosses than its cost-saving and network optimisation benefits, says research of 200 UK-based global company CIOs? by specialist integrator of next-generation technologies, Teneo.
While global companies use different MPLS, broadband and public Wi-Fi for their WANs as they expand, these arrangements are leading to local-level application performance issues and rising network costs. Since SD-WAN tools enable CIOs at the centre to find out what is going wrong at branch level, they are attracting growing interest from global carriers, networking vendors and CIOs alike. Analyst Gartner estimates that there are 4,000 SD-WAN production implementations world-wide and predicts that one third of global businesses will be using SD-WAN by 2020.?
Teneo’s research found, however, that UK CIOs still face serious resourcing and skills gaps as they try to reconcile their global and local network infrastructure needs.
Survey interviewees said that their three most serious networking challenges are high management costs for their divisional and branch IT networks, stated by 40% of respondents, ahead of high network upgrade costs in general (35%) and a lack of team resources and skills to monitor local networks (29%).
Teneo’s survey indicates that UK-based global companies facing technology resource constraints will also take many years to bring SD-WAN strategies to fruition. Only just over four in ten (44%) of UK interviewees say they will be deploying these technologies globally in five years’ time while three out of ten CIOs (30%) say they will only implement SD-WAN tools on some of their sites.
Teneo’s CTO Marc Sollars says that IT executives are having to do a fine balancing act. He says: “Networks are so complicated now that CIOs need a practical way to deal with branch-level application issues alongside global needs. The trouble is, they don’t have the resources for locally-based troubleshooting or running regional networking teams to ensure high-performing applications 24/7.
“There’s been so much focus on businesses’ strategic digital transformations in recent years that we’re in danger of forgetting the importance of customer responsiveness to companies’ regional and branch-level lines of business. SD-WAN’s ability to show what’s going on at grass roots gives UK CIOs a realistic way to ‘think global and act local’ with their network infrastructures especially as their IT resources are likely to be tightly constrained for the foreseeable future.”
