Riverbed Technology conducted a regional survey, which revealed that Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) adoption in the Middle East is set to follow the global trend, with nearly 50% of enterprises already having initial discussions around the adoption of this technology. The survey conducted by Riverbed at the end of 2016 also found that 78% of organizations agree that SD-WAN will be a critical part of their network infrastructure within the next five years. 
“SD-WAN represents the future of networking and is a rapidly growing technology trend. It is an approach that can solve the complexity of hybrid clouds and networks, improve efficiency and flexibility, and enable organizations to easily shift workloads and deploy new applications and services including into the cloud,” said Elie Dib, Senior Managing Director, Middle East, Turkey and North Africa, at Riverbed Technology.
The survey found that loss of critical services; user, network and application vulnerabilities; as well as increased and costly IT complexity are currently the top three challenges that organizations face with their WANs.
SD-WAN addresses these issues by providing an intelligent and intuitive approach to designing, deploying and managing distributed networks for today’s hybrid enterprise. Among the many advantages offered by SD-WAN, Middle East respondents believe the top benefits include: increased application and network visibility and security (56%); and reduction in complexity of network configuration and increased utilization of resources (50%).
The need for SD-WAN is also being driven by budget constraints as cost-effective delivery of apps (65%) and the ability to scale network bandwidth without increasing cost (52%), are the top criteria impacting WAN investment decisions, according to results from the survey. The outlook for SD-WAN adoption in the Middle East over the next five years is highly positive as IT teams gain a better understanding of the concept and the benefits it holds.
