SD-WAN

Medium-Business-SD-WAN-Considerations

SD-WAN for the Medium Sized Business

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In our previous blog post, we discussed how many small to midsized business (SMB) organizations are rarely asked “what is the business problem you want SD-WAN to solve?” by SD-WAN vendors. Business intent is an important discussion for all CIOs and IT managers considering SD-WAN, but many SD-WAN vendors default to selling on a list of product features and hardware specifications.

In our conversations with IT buyers, SD-WAN Rankings found that CIOs and IT managers want vendors to offer SD-WAN setups that help solve business rather than technological issues. Hardware specifications and datasheets for an SD-WAN appliance do not answer the critical question that every CIO is asking: “What are we needing this SD-WAN solution to do for our business?”

For CIOs whose businesses are no longer small but not quite up to the global enterprise level, SD-WAN Rankings encourages midsized businesses to consider these criteria for a successful SD-WAN deployment:

Defining midsized

The fact that there is no universally-accepted definition for a “midsized” company should not be a surprise. Multiple studies in North America and Europe have determined that the majority of everyone with a steady job considers themselves to be “middle-class workers.” The corporate director and university administrator making six-figure salaries considered themselves to be in the same socioeconomic strata as the office worker and college instructor working under them for significantly less money.

Rather than defining a “midsized” business strictly by revenue, think of a business as a company serving and staffed by the local community. Small businesses serve communities, midsized and large businesses scale up to serve larger communities and geographical areas. SD-WAN Rankings is looking at midsized businesses that include financial services such as regional banks, manufacturing firms, and retailers such as car dealerships with repair services. These midsized companies have multiple offices and employees that are spread out across a large geographical area but not at a nationwide scale. As such, these companies want a consistency of service from SD-WAN and can often spend more on the IT resources required to achieve that higher level of quality.

SD-WAN Rankings Recommendations for midsized and multistate companies

CIOs at midsized organizations are likely to be interested in a managed services provider for SD-WAN rather than a large telecom carrier or pure do it yourself SD-WAN appliance vendor. The biggest downside of carrier-based or DIY SD-WAN for midsized businesses is the cost of support. An appliance vendor for SD-WAN hardware such as VMware VeloCloud or Versa are good for companies with a DIY ethos when it comes to IT—and have the large IT budgets and human capital to deploy and manage them. A telecom carrier such as AT&T or Verizon in the USA, Bell or Telus in Canada, and BT, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, and Telefonica in Europe often will provide good support for SD-WAN deployments, but are often bureaucratic and slow—unless your company has the money to pay for “named account” support.

The most successful SD-WAN deployments at midsized companies are performed by managed service providers (MSPs). Fittingly, it is the mid-sized MSPs such as Masergy and CenturyLink in the US offering the most viable options around price, performance, and support. In Canada, providers of business cable services such as Shaw do well. European midsized organizations often operate on a much different scale than in North America because of the geography. A business in the USA that operates in a couple of states in the northeast or southwest would be classified as an international busines in much of central  Europe. As such, European customers should consider Europe-based MSPs such as Colt or Open Systems or US-based MSPs with a strong international presence such as Masergy and Aryaka. 

While an unmanaged or DIY SD-WAN is not recommended for the midsized business, Citrix, Fortinet, and VMware VeloCloud work well if the organization can commit to the required onsite IT resources.

Trusted SD-WAN Advisors

SDWAN Rankings exists to help you find the best solutions to help with your networking needs. Organizations selecting SD-WAN providers often rely on the partner community as trusted advisors to help select these networking technologies.  We can help you select a partner that will help you through vendor selection at no cost. ever. If you’d like an introduction to SD-WAN vendors or partners, let us know. 

sd-wan and ucaas

SD-WAN and Unified Communications

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SD-WAN and UC convergence has already started

SD-WAN and Unified Communications are on a crash course of convergence. Whether you using on-premise or cloud-based voice solutions, the need for reliability and SLAs are critical to enable productivity, instant messenger and presence (IM&P), are not impacted by limited bandwidth.

SD-WAN as a technology is derived to create inherent cost savings, reliability, security, and a better user experience. This convergence has accelerated as distributed workforces have continued to grow and reached critical mass with the current pandemic. The inability to travel to the office means that employees need to be able to connect remotely, leverage high quality voice and video, as well as share documents and services to continue productivity for the organization. The issue is that these solutions continue to be incredibly bandwidth intensive and require high bandwidth prioritization.

SD-WAN solves this conundrum by offering flexibility to connect any mix of traditional networking (MPLS), internet, or dedicated internet access (DIA), and VPN over public internet to provide continuity across any connection type. Additionally, SD-WAN routers can now connect to 4G and 5G wireless access points for backup or primary.

SD-WAN Providers are already partnering with UCaaS Providers

The proof is in the putting in a lot of organizations are already seeing success. What’s interesting is we see more of a hybrid approach to ask you and you can ask versus moving everything to an estimate on solutions as we stated before. We are seeing this massive movement with SD-WAN organizations like Cato partnering with UCaaS providers like RingCentral and others to provide a networking invoice solution and reliable and scalable fashion.

Trusted SD-WAN Advisors

SDWAN Rankings exists to help you find the best solutions to help with your networking needs. Organizations selecting SD-WAN providers often rely on the partner community as trusted advisors to help select these networking technologies.  We can help you select a partner that will help you through vendor selection at no cost. ever. If you’d like an introduction to SD-WAN vendors or partners, let us know. 

GTT-Expands-Silverpeark-Americas-again

GTT expands SD-WAN portfolio… again

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In January, GTT announced the incorporation of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN services. This was in addition to already having offerings from VMware (VeloCloud) and SilverPeak Unity EdgeConnect. at the time, Todd Kiehn stated, “Fortinet has been a long-standing partner of GTT, delivering network firewall solutions as a core aspect of GTT’s managed security portfolio.”

Diving deeper it appears that the acquisition of interoute gave them access to the aforementioned Silver Peak solutions. Interoute, one of the largest network providers in the EMEA region was a very large (if not the largest) acquisition made by GTT in 2018. The $2 Billion cash transaction expanded GTT’s coverage area broadly. It also gave them innovations as Interoute was seen as the only competitor to perennial networking innovation organization Masergy in Gartner’s Network Magic Quadrant. GTT has since fallen back into the niche category.

Reclaim old glory?

GTT Stock Performance

Now the Silver Peak solution is available in the Americas. It will be interesting to see if they can move the needle and reclaim growth and take market share. The SD-WAN space has become increasingly convoluted and we’ve been bullish on massive consolidation even during and post-pandemic. It is important to note that GTT has a variety of debt obligations that come full circle in the coming years and the general performance outlook is down short, mid, and long term from the Commodity Channel Index. In fact, since mid 2018 (shortly after the Interoute acquisition) GTT’s stock has been on a steady decline from $56 dollars per share to around $9 dollars a share.

Americas Expansion

IDC anticipates enterprise SD-WAN services to grow over 25% per year through 2023 in the Americas Region. GTT uses this metric as a key reason for their SD-WAN / Silver Peak addition stating, “The addition of Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect expands GTT’s managed SD-WAN offering in the Americas and offers enterprises an attractive technology option to meet their specific network bandwidth and applications requirements,” stated Ghassan Abdo, research vice president, worldwide telecom at IDC. “GTT’s managed SD-WAN service allows enterprises to focus critical IT personnel on core business operational activity and provides substantial value-add in the management of complex network integrations, as well as helping conserve scarce capital resources.”     

Has GTT Turned the Corner?

On May 8th 2020, GTT announced their financials for Q1 2020. It is interesting that while their YoY revenue was down 5%, their QoQ performance was up marginally. Given the beginnings of the pandemic, uncertainty and distractions, this may actually be a positive sign. Additionally, while EBITDA has decreased, their cash flow increased 37% QoQ and 157% YoY and their CAPEX decreased nearly half a % point as a percent of revenue.

The biggest concern with this announcement is can GTT provide a consistent reliable user experience across 3 of the top SD-WAN Services available today. If they can succeed in this area, they may be poised to seize the market as our society continues its digital transformation revolution.

Trusted SD-WAN Advisors

SDWAN Rankings exists to help you find the best solutions to help with your networking needs. Organizations selecting SD-WAN providers often rely on the partner community as trusted advisors to help select these networking technologies.  We can help you select a partner that will help you through vendor selection at no cost. ever. If you’d like an introduction to SD-WAN vendors or partners, let us know. 

SD-WAN HOME OFFICE REQUIREMENTS

Requirements for Home Office SD-WAN

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TL:DR SD-WAN deployments for high value remote workers require:

  • Security
  • Access to Cloud and Remote applications
  • Reliability and Bandwidth

SD-WAN is incredibly easy to deploy. The issue with SD-WAN for the home offices is that it’s still incredibly complex and may be cost prohibitive for all employees.

The home office has a variety of challenges that may require proper bandwidth prioritization and security especially in this new work from home era.

For example, home bandwidth hogs include remote office applications including UCaaS / Voice, Collaboration, Video, Office 365 and Google apps. Additionally, there are personal devices hogging bandwidth on iPads, iPhones, and web streaming. Additionally, home offices rely on external security threats including malware and phishing threats.

Most homes have some combinations of wireline and cell phones that provide 4G connections, but they likely don’t have a true wireless backup solution that connects with the router.

Home Office Security

Continuous connectivity allows remote workers secure connectivity to the core network. IT Technical Support, Executives, Programmers, Financial employees and more need reliable and secure access to sensitive and confidential resources.

SD-WAN allows remote workers to integrate with business level functions including web filtering, malware protection and other secure features

Application Access

Digital transformation has had a profound impact on the way we work. Given the recent pandemic, IT leaders have accelerated digital transformation even more. Access to cloud applications is easy, but how do users access proprietary core applications that may not exist in the cloud. Organizations like Vorbi are allowing organizations to virtualize their applications that were once entirely on-premise. These organizations align with SD-WAN providers to provide, secure and reliable access to the entire suite of services needed by High-Value Remote workers

Reliability and Control

Home-based Remote SD-WAN provides unprecedented reliability. On top of bandwidth prioritization (your kids watching youtube simultaneously on 5 devices) allows business applications higher priority for essential business needs. Additionally, SD-WAN routers can have primary as well as back up features for the worker that needs them.

Final Thoughts

For most workers, SD-WAN in the home office is likely overkill. There are specific use cases in which true SD-WAN may be required. Understanding which employees would gain value is important. Here are some questions to ask if you’re wondering if you need SD-WAN at your remote home office.

  • Are there any applications required that are inaccessible through the cloud?
  • Are there any bandwidth limitations or devices that are hogging data?
  • What security policies are in place related to Data-Sharing and privacy?
  • Is the remote connectivity needed permanently or temporarily?

Trusted SD-WAN Advisors

SDWAN Rankings exists to help you find the best solutions to help with your networking needs. Organizations selecting SD-WAN providers often rely on the partner community as trusted advisors to help select these networking technologies.  We can help you select a partner that will help you through vendor selection at no cost. ever. If you’d like an introduction to SD-WAN vendors or partners, let us know. 

SD-WAN Growth 2019

75% SD-WAN Market Growth in One Quarter

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SD-WAN revenue reached almost $640 Million for the fourth quarter of 2019, a 75% increase ($365m over the same period in 2018). The main driver for the growth appears to be Service Providers embracing the fact that they are no longer carriers allowing them to bundle various other services including Unified Communications (UCaaS) and managed security services.

Cliff Grossner, Senior research directors for Omdia was stated as saying “The SD-WAN market is moving toward larger scale and globalized deployments…” he also cited that vendors are releasing new features around SD-WAN to support the scale needed to embrace enterprise level deployments.

VMWare is the front runner

VMware is the obvious front-runner in the SD-WAN market with over 16% total market share. Worth noting, Fortinet (as previously reported on sdwanrankings.com) is gaining significant momentum and is stealing market share quickly placing them in a surprising third-place finish for q4 2019. It will be interesting to see if they can usurp Cisco in the coming quarters.

Other interesting data points from the report include:

  • The top 3 SD-WAN providers represent ~ 41% of total market share
  • The Next 9 Providers (including Aryaka, SIlver Peak, Versa, Hussein, Nuage, Oracle, and Cradlepoint) represent the next 40% of market share
  • The rest of the market only makes up ~19% of total SD-WAN Deployments

This means consolidation!

Omdia Data Center Report : https://technology.informa.com/550561/data-center-network-equipment-market-tracker

I expect that the top 3 or 4 SD-WAN providers look to the outliers as potential acquisition targets. The majority of the players with any meaningful wallet share either have too much venture capital (Aryaka) or are too large to consolidate. That being said, Silver Peak could be an interesting play that would be a market mover in the near term.

There is much more insight in the Omdia Data Center Report and we highly recommend checking it out here. https://technology.informa.com/550561/data-center-network-equipment-market-tracker

Trusted SD-WAN Advisors

SDWAN Rankings exists to help you find the best solutions to help with your networking needs. Organizations selecting SD-WAN providers often rely on the partner community as trusted advisors to help select these networking technologies.  We can help you select a partner that will help you through vendor selection at no cost. ever. If you’d like an introduction to SD-WAN vendors or partners, let us know. 

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700% Growth with SD-WAN?

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AT&T is touting that their SD-WAN solutions have seen parabolic growth from the COVID-19 pandemic. These numbers are incredible, but come with a caveat. The telecommunications behemoth may be “stretching” what constitutes true SD_WAN. The technology seeing the growth authenticates through more traditional VPN means leveraging IPSec for authentication and encryption. That being said, the solution allows multiple users and a variety of access methods. The “box” is just running on a computer.

A rose by any other name?

This brings up the real question- will these types of interpretations of SD-WAN have an impact moving forward? The fact that AT&T is enabling remote work quickly matters most. Calling it SD-WAN doesn’t hurt the bottom line however. It will be curious to see how this product technically designated “network-based IP remote access VPN” will be leveraged moving forward. The good news is that the Blue Giant stated that network performance hasn’t been impacted and their cloud-based systems are nominal.

What are your thoughts? Does this count as true SD-WAN deployment?

Trusted SD-WAN Advisors

SDWAN Rankings exists to help you find the best solutions to help with your networking needs. Organizations selecting SD-WAN providers often rely on the partner community as trusted advisors to help select these networking technologies.  We can help you select a partner that will help you through vendor selection at no cost. ever. If you’d like an introduction to SD-WAN vendors or partners, let us know. 

SaaS Rankings (2)

SD-WAN Vulnerabilities with Cisco Routers

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Cisco has released emergency patches for their SD-WAN routers. Anyone leveraging Cisco management software will need their admin’s to apply these patches as quickly as possible. While these technologies have changed how the WAN works, Patches like these present major risks for organizations. Unfortunately, as organizations become more and more “Sofwared-Defined” or As-a-Service, Vulnerabilities undoubtedly continue to become more prevalent and these types of issues are critical to address.

Warnings about the weaknesses in their offerings three of the five are very vulnerable. The biggest risk would allow attackers access through the commandline interface to inject commands that provide route privileges. Once excluded the attacker will then gain access to a wide array of data that could further compromise the systems.

These vulnerabilities affect the number of Cisco products most of which are leveraging the SD when

Released earlier than 19.2.2. Cisco also announce that there were no workarounds in any vulnerabilities could be a big issue if these pictures are not put in place.

More information can be found on Ciscos website.

Trusted SD-WAN Advisors

SDWAN Rankings exists to help you find the best solutions to help with your networking needs. Organizations selecting SD-WAN providers often rely on the partner community as trusted advisors to help select these networking technologies.  We can help you select a partner that will help you through vendor selection at no cost. ever. If you’d like an introduction to SD-WAN vendors or partners, let us know. 

GTT and the Burden of Debt in the SD-WAN era

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GTT has announced major shifts on it’s earnings call today. The company plans to sell of and liquidate their massive infrastructure services. This was clearly a difficult decision, but necessary to remove those assets as they continue focusing on Software Defined services. As stated on the call, the company hopes this selloff will give them financial freedom needed to reduce their debt obligations driven by a half decade of massive SD-WAN acquisitions. The burden is already high (totaling more than $3 Billion) and will grow yearly through 2025. The biggest questions will be: 1. Can GTT find a buyer (They’re leveraging Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs). and 2. Can GTT get the integrations complete.

The integrations continue to be a big hurdle for telecom. Companies that successfully integrate are going to thrive in this new era, but don’t be surprised if there is additional liquidation from failed integrations in the future.

Trusted SD-WAN Advisors

SDWAN Rankings exists to help you find the best solutions to help with your networking needs. Organizations selecting SD-WAN providers often rely on the partner community as trusted advisors to help select these networking technologies.  We can help you select a partner that will help you through vendor selection at no cost. ever. If you’d like an introduction to SD-WAN vendors or partners, let us know. 

sd-wan-2025

SD-WAN growth 2020 to 2025

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SD-WAN investment surged past $1 billion in 2019.  This MPLS alternative is growing like crazy over- almost 70% in 2019. Today, market share leaders including Cisco Versa networks, VMware, and Silver Peak combined the majority of  revenue making up almost 70%. As we head into 2020 expect additional enterprise investment and SD-WAN to become more integrated into global networks as organizations continue to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. 2025 is the magic year for SD-WAn providers.  By the middle of this decade, SD-WAN should completely usurp legacy networking tech as MPLS continues its slow decline. The top reasons organizations are trying to move through this process include decrease hardware costs, Augmenting personnel expenses, and security.

Decreased Hardware Costs

Businesses are finding that maintaining and managing their hardware is expensive and very consuming of personnel and resources. Virtualization is decreasing as expensive as lowering

maintenance requirements throughout the enterprise. These cost savings are allowing companies to speed up digital transformation  helping companies retire expensive legacy technologies and re-architecting their networking infrastructure. This shifting tide towards single platforms should unify the edge, optimize enterprises, and simplify / consolidate.

Resource Management

Virtual cloud networking and SD-WAN is helping IT professionals control and connect to resources to handle digital transformation issues. Historically these applications were hosted in the data centers or locally, but now with as-a-Service (aaS) offerings including infrastructure (IaaS), software (SaaS) etc. are helping companies see increased benefit from SD-WAN type networking and technologies. A major feature for SD-WAN includes prioritization features that help select which applications consume bandwidth and when flexibility is critical.  These efficiency gains help organizations decrease costs. 

Security

Virtualization of the network enables obvious security gains through stronger network design, patch enablement, and isolation of applications and data.  These Sd-WAN solutions include secure end to end encryption, zone-based firewalls, and visibility and control of all data and apps. These tools decrease network risk to services and change how data interact with eachother. 

SD-WAN heading into 2025

If an organization is considering deploying SD-WAN, they can see real benefits by decreasing costs and increasing a multitude of productivity opportunities. Reliance on legacy hardware has become an achilles heel. Additionally, 4G/LTE is a great solution that integrates with SD-WAN to minimize risks associated with disaster recovery and enabling business continuity.  The jury is still out on the impact of 5G.

Trusted SD-WAN Advisors

SDWAN Rankings exists to help you find the best solutions to help with your networking needs. Organizations selecting SD-WAN providers often rely on the partner community as trusted advisors to help select these networking technologies.  We can help you select a partner that will help you through vendor selection at no cost. ever. If you’d like an introduction to SD-WAN vendors or partners, let us know. 

FORTINET-VS-PALO-SD-WAN

Palo Alto vs. Fortinet SD-WAN Battle

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Today, Palo Alto Networks has signaled their intentions regarding the competitive SD-WAN market. Palo needs to move quickly to cut into the early lead fortinet enjoys in the Sd-WAN space. The industry has been a tale of two cities. Fortinet stock has enjoyed a lift from SD-WAN while Palo Alto has suffered from slowed growth.

With RSA Conference this week, expect big announcements in this and other cyber security areas as well as a continued debate related to the software-defined industry at large.

Gartner has recently released their updated guide noting over 40 vendors competing for limited SD-WAN markethare. Other network leaders including Cisco and Juniper Networks are moving hard to maintain and grow market share. Currently, SD-WAN represents roughly $2 Billion in market investment and is expected to grow over 30% in the next 5 years.

Trusted SD-WAN Advisors

SDWAN Rankings exists to help you find the best solutions to help with your networking needs. Organizations selecting SD-WAN providers often rely on the partner community as trusted advisors to help select these networking technologies.  We can help you select a partner that will help you through vendor selection at no cost. ever. If you’d like an introduction to SD-WAN vendors or partners, let us know. 

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