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With increasing digital disruption, IT organisations are challenged to find ways to continually reduce the costs and complexities of managing an enterprise wide area network (WAN). Among the approaches adopted in recent years is software-defined networking (SDN) – an architecture usually used for internal datacentres at a campus or corporate headquarters. A similar software-defined system is a technology called SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network), which further uses the software concept to separate the control and data aspects of traditional WAN. With an ASEAN perspective in mind, Computer Weekly set out to explore the premise that will see most enterprise adopting a “cloud-first” SD-WAN architecture in 2018 – designed to efficiently and effectively support the ongoing evolution in their application mix. Challenges with traditional networks Nikhil Batra, IDC Asia-Pacific’s senior research manager for telecoms, says most WAN traffic today – to and from branch and remote sites – is destined for the cloud, either to ...