SD-WAN

At the WAN Summit in Frankfurt in March, network managers got up on stage and shared what’s keeping them up at night.

The global software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) market for large multinational enterprises is worth $3 billion, according to TeleGeography research. This accounts for just 5% of the total global market, while multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) is worth $17 billion and maintains 29% of the market.

After coming together at New York in June, the WAN community found a lot to discuss. We caught up with Michael Martin, Networking and Security Architect at McKinsey & Company, to hear about the specifics of designing networks for the consulting industry and how technology and business need to come together.

The huge shift in enterprise networking over the past two years focused on the fact that, in many cases, COVID lockdowns evicted entire workforces out of their offices and into their living rooms. But the work of some companies was too important to make remote. Most of these were in healthcare, policing, and other emergency services, but there are plenty more ‘key workers’ who had no choice but to stay in position.