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There has been a lot of buzz around SD-WAN in recent months. And little wonder when you look at the growth predictions. According to IDC, global SD-WAN infrastructure and services revenues are growing at a rapid pace and expected to reach $8bn by 2021. The figure for EMEA is predicted to hit $2.4bn. The growth is being driven by digital transformation, the rise in cloud-based SaaS business applications and a wider acceptance of SDN. Further reinforcing the IDC estimates, Cisco’s latest Visual Networking Index forecasts that “SD-WAN traffic will grow at a CAGR of 37 percent compared to 3 percent for traditional MPLS-based WAN. SD-WAN will increase 5-fold and will be 29 percent of WAN traffic by 2022”. Rohit Mehra, vice president, network infrastructure at IDC, argues that interest in SD-WAN is growing because traditional WANs are not built for the cloud and are poorly suited to the security requirements. “SD-WAN is not a solution in search of a problem,” he says, adding that it “builds on hybrid WAN to offer a more complete ...