To say the market for public cloud services is piping hot would be an understatement. It’s been estimated that these services will grow three times as quickly as the IT services overall market, according to Gartner analysis. By 2022, the market for software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) is expected to top $331 billion. A new survey from the network, data, and security company Barracuda Networks takes a look at the current state of the SD-WAN market, future deployments, and more.

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Adoption trends and preferences across industries

The survey involved 750 executives, team managers responsible for overseeing or knowledgeable about their organization’s technical cloud infrastructure. Nearly three-quarters of respondents (74%) said they have already deployed SD-WAN or planned to within the next year. 

Security concerns are the main bulwark preventing the adoption of public cloud use.

The adoption of these networks varies across industries and sectors. Overall, SD-WAN adoption was highest across the financial services sector. About one-third (35%) of respondents in financial services said their organizations had already deployed SD-WAN, with another 18% in the process of doing so. 

Comparatively, more than 42% of respondents in IT, technology, and telecommunications are in the process of deploying these solutions, with another 22% noting the solutions were already in use. On the lower end of the adoption spectrum, only 7% of public sector respondents had deployed SD-WAN, with an additional 36% currently rolling out or planning to deploy the solution within a year.

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Microsoft Azure perceived as tops

The report also highlights the preferences and perceptions surrounding these solutions. More than half of respondents specifically wanted cloud provider SD-WAN solutions. Among those interested in using an outside vendor to obtain SD-WAN, knowledge and ease of adoption were the main considerations across the US. Compared to Amazon AWS and Google GCP GCP, Microsoft Azure swept the board as the preferred solution among respondents. Microsoft Azure was also viewed as the most secure and most user-friendly of these options. Respondents found Microsoft Azure to be “50% more preferred than Amazon AWS.” When compared to Google GCP, respondents found Azure to be 125% more preferential.

“As more organizations move to public cloud, SD-WAN technology is a critical part of securing these cloud deployments,” said Klaus Gheri, VP, Network Security, Barracuda. “By deploying an all-in-one, secure SD-WAN solution natively built into the public cloud network, organizations can reap the full benefits of public cloud.”

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