Riverbed's research came from a survey conducted at VMworld 2015 conference in San Francisco. Attendees with a median company size of 2,300 employees, were questioned about their current and future plans to adopt enterprise networking innovations, including software-defined networking, and SD-WAN.
According to the survey, 77 per cent of respondents said that their organisations were at some level of participation with SDN solutions within their datacentre. This included the 13 per cent that had already deployed SDN.
Of those surveyed, 29 per cent were exploring similar architectures for their remote branch office locations, including nearly 5 per cent who had already implemented SD-WAN solutions.
The top three drivers for adopting a software-defined approach to networking included the ability to deploy new applications and services quickly (71 per cent), cost reduction (69 per cent), and reduction in mistakes when deploying applications and services (68 per cent).
Riverbed Technology senior vice president and general manager of the SteelHead and SteelFusion business units, Paul O’Farrell, said that, with increasing complexity in today’s hybrid IT environments, organisations seek better ways to have full visibility and deliver applications across their distributed enterprise.
“With the rise of SaaS applications, coupled with an insatiable demand for more bandwidth, traditional approaches to wide-area networking no longer meet the needs of business. The emerging area of SD-WAN allows applications to be delivered securely and optimally across hybrid networks and hybrid clouds with reduced cost, increased speed/agility and streamlined management,” he said.
“While the survey clearly indicates we’re still in the early days of SDN and SD-WAN, we expect that over the next 3-5 years many organisations will deploy a SD-WAN solution as a modern replacement for traditional branch networking solutions."
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