CIO OPINION
changing conditions and has become a
significant inhibitor to a company’s ability to
transform. It’s time to change that. To meet
the needs of the new digitally transformed
and ‘Connected Enterprise,’ the legacy WAN
needs to be transformed to become more
secure, elastic and reliable.
Evidence of the lack of WAN readiness to
support digital transformation initiatives can
be found in the recent State of the Network
study conducted by Cradlepoint. A total
of 77% of IT decision makers surveyed –
from businesses of all sizes – cited their top
concerns as WAN bandwidth limitations,
reliability and cost.
These are the very operational factors that
get stressed with the adoption of cloud,
mobile and IoT. While branch connectivity
remains important, the real growth in
connected endpoints is coming from people
and things. Work is no longer a place you
go, but rather a thing that you do from
wherever you are and on whatever device
you choose.
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INTELLIGENTCIO
IDC claims that 75% of the workforce will be
afforded a mobile workstyle by 2020. IoT is
poised to make up the largest constituency
of endpoints in the coming years, with
Gartner estimating that more than 7.5
“
CIOS NEED TO
‘SKATE BEYOND
THE BRANCH’ TO
WHERE THE PUCK
IS GOING WHEN
CONSIDERING
NEW WAN
REQUIREMENTS.
billion connected devices will be deployed
within enterprises by 2020. Already, 47%
of surveyed enterprises are grappling
with deploying IoT initiatives on their
current WAN according to a 2016 study by
Enterprise Management Associates.
CIOs need to ‘skate beyond the branch’ to
where the puck is going when considering
new WAN requirements. WANs must be
transformed to be more scalable, more
secure, more reliable, more automated, plus
more agile. It’s the only way to respond to
far-flung, rapidly-evolving business needs of
today’s enterprises.
SD-WAN in practice
While the struggle is real, a number of new
and evolving technologies have emerged
to aid in WAN transformation and make
it possible to have a unified approach
to connecting people, places and things
across the enterprise and beyond. They
include cloud-based management and
orchestration, Software-defined WAN (SD-
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