SD-WAN industry growth opens partner opportunities in 2021

Edges need to be smoothed out

Despite SD-WAN market growth, the technology has some rough edges to it still. "The SD-WAN market and customer base is now encountering new areas beyond their comfort zone," Gorkowienko said.

One challenge is the absence of comprehensive standard SD-WAN protocols. "All current SD-WAN solutions are proprietary, which -- in turn -- results in vendor lock-in," he said.

In 2021, the SD-WAN industry will try to address the technology's shortcomings. For example, SD-WAN vendors will attempt to manage SD-WAN system interfaces and its virtualized services more effectively, according to Spirent Communications. Provisioning needs to be automated, so, ideally, customers spend no time on it.

Security is also a pressing concerning. When corporations quickly moved employees from the office to work-from-home setups, a major security hurdle arose. Businesses needed to ensure such connections remained secure, even though they had little to no control over how they were configured.

Inadequate SD-WAN implementations or configurations can expand the network attack surface and potentially exposes businesses to threats, Gorkowienko said.

SD-WAN standards emerge

A few possible SD-WAN standards have begun to take shape. The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), a vendor and user consortium operating since 2001 and focused on WAN network standards, has been working on two standards:

• SD-WAN Security Standard, or MEF 88, is designed to provide standard connections from enterprise networks to carrier services. The standard creates policies for IP packets entering WAN services, determines how they are classified into application flows and understands how to forward them based on their configuration and acceptable use policies.
• Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is an emerging network architecture that outlines how security features should be implemented in SD-WANs. The specification works in conjunction with nine other MEF standards covering areas like application security, a zero-trust framework and policy based orchestration.

What next?

Organizations that implement SASE will realize many benefits, Cohn said, including the following:

• much higher scalability than legacy VPNs;
• substantially reduced latency, eliminating the need for backhauling service;
• streamlined client endpoints, as security functions are offloaded to the cloud;
• centralized and simplified management; and
• simpler deployment and maintenance.

Enterprises have begun to tinker with MEF-88 and SASE. "What enterprises will discover as they embrace SD-WANs is that operationizing them is much different than traditional network services," Cohn noted. Consequently, an opportunity has opened for channel partners to become their trusted advisors in these implementations, he said.