With increasing digitization of business operations, a plethora of mission-critical assets such as enterprise information, databases, and applications are increasingly becoming highly vulnerable to unauthorized access and cyber-attacks. The conventionally used wide area network (WAN) solutions are not able to protect networks from various threats and provide efficient and effective security control for several cloud-based applications. This is why software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) solutions are being adopted for assisting in the monitoring and measuring of network traffic.
Moreover, these solutions help information technology (IT) professionals gain deeper visibility into WAN and allow them to accurately detect and identify security attacks. Besides this, the increasing adoption of big data and the internet of things (IoT) in various business operations is also fueling the expansion of the software-defined wide area network market across the world. As per the Microsoft IoT Signals Report 2019, 85% of the total number of respondents have already adopted the IoT.
Furthermore, nearly 75% have started working on various IoT-based projects. However, there are various challenges associated with the usage of big data and the IoT such as high costs of implementation, data privacy issues, issues related to the management and handling of the data, the lack of proper knowledge, and concerns regarding security issues. SD-WAN provides zero-touch provisioning (the automatic configuration of devices and systems with minimal human intervention), minimization of risks, and centralized control and management.
As a result, it is increasingly being adopted by businesses for managing the various challenges arising from the usage of big data and the IoT. Due to these factors, the popularity of SD-WAN solutions is soaring all over the world, which is, in turn, driving the advancement of the global software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) market. The valuation of the market is predicted to grow from $1.4 billion in 2019 to $43.0 billion by 2030.
Furthermore, the market is predicted to advance at a CAGR of 38.6% between 2020 and 2030. Depending on offering, the market is divided into service and solution. Between these, the solution category recorded higher growth in the market during the last few years. This was primarily because of the large-scale adoption of connected devices and the internet of things, the huge popularity of multi-cloud environment, the demand for a highly secured network infrastructure, and the presence of stringent compliance requirements.
Globally, the software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) market will demonstrate the fastest growth in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region in the upcoming years, as per the estimates of P&S Intelligence, a market research company based in India. This will be because of the soaring information technology (IT) spending, the increasing implementation of favorable government policies regarding 5G deployment in Japan and China, the growing usage of connected devices, and the ballooning popularity of the cloud computing technology in the region.
