As American humorist Mark Twain once said about the weather, "Everybody talks about, but nobody does anything about it!" The situation regarding the preparedness of India-based enterprise networks for next-generation cloud-centred business is not dissimilar.
A survey just published: the Riverbed Future of Networking Global Survey 2017, finds that of the Indian decision makers interviewed, 98 per cent agree that a next generation network is critical to keep up with the needs of their business and end users.
They also agree that SD-WAN (software-defined wide area networking) is the key technology that will accelerate their cloud-based digital transformation. Indeed, 92 per cent said they plan to migrate to SD-WAN within the next four years. But right now, just 3 per cent have taken steps to do so. The survey finds that the global scene is hardly better—only 4% worldwide are SDN-ready.
Today nearly half (42 per cent) of Indian businesses experience problems with migration to the cloud, that is mostly the result of old, legacy networks. Some 79 per cent of these same decision makers say, because they are saddled with old networks, they are still several years away from reaching the full potential of digital transformation. This has been seen in verticals such as financial, manufacturing, retail, energy and utilities, communications and media, and IT services.
The problem appears to be more acute in India compared to the global scenario—84 per cent in India hamstrung by legacy networks, compared to 69 per cent worldwide.
The good news in the Riverbed findings: This situation is about to change dramatically. Over the next two years, the number of companies embracing SD-WAN is expected to hit 52 per cent in the next 2 years and 93 per cent in the next four years. There are good reasons that are propelling Indian businesses into adopting software-defined next-gen networks: Increase application performance, network automation, simplicity/ease of management, instant cloud connectivity to services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure—and lower costs.
Tech Note: What is SD-WAN?
The software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) is one specific application of software defined networking (SDN) to Wide Area Networks which connect enterprise networks, including branch offices and data centres, over large geographic distances. Instead of the old way of rigidly connected servers and storage, SDN allows one to mix-n-match these physical elements, depending on the load and then control them externally via software.
