A significant majority of enterprieses expect a hybrid work environment to persist after the pandemic recedes, according to Aryaka’s fifth annual 2021 State of the WAN report. The study surveyed over 1350 global IT and network practitioners at enterprises spanning all verticals, headquartered in NA, APAC and EMEA. The survey asked respondents about their networking and performance challenges, priorities and their plans for 2021 and beyond.
The report finds that the number of enterprises connecting to over 100 inter-regional sites growing by 50%, from 19% in 2020 to 28% in 2021. This is coupled with continued application growth, with the number of enterprises stating that they’ve deployed over 500 distinct applications growing to 46%, compared to 32% in 2021. As evidence of collaboration traction, Zoom was identified as critical by 36% in 2021, up from 25% in 2020.
Key trends identified in this year’s report include:
- Accelerating fusion of networking and security planning, with almost a third of enterprises stating that they are already deploying what they consider to be a secure access service edge (SASE) architecture
- A hybrid work environment that will persist after the pandemic recedes, with over 80% stating that they expect over a quarter of workers to remain remote, and over two-thirds desiring flexibility between on-premises and remote deployments
- Continued WAN and application growth, resulting in increased network complexity. The number of enterprises reporting they’re deploying over 500 distinct applications has grown to 46%. 37% of enterprises identify complexity as their number one network concern
- 43% of enterprises identify application performance as an underlying driver for WAN transformation. However, WAN transformations have slowed this year due to the pandemic
- Over 70% of enterprises intend to move to managed services versus just 18% who prefer the autonomy of a do-it-yourself WAN solution
“The fifth edition of the Global State of the WAN is bigger and better than ever, with survey inputs and insights from over 1350 Enterprises worldwide,” said Shashi Kiran, CMO of Aryaka. “On behalf of Aryaka Networks, I would like to express my gratitude to those who participated in this survey, and hope this serves as an excellent resource and guidebook for all those CIOs, network, cloud and security practitioners to leverage and proactively Plan their WAN™. Of particular interest are the trends focusing on SD-WAN and SASE deployments.”