WAN Summit Q&A with Ian Waters of ThousandEyes
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WAN Summit Q&A with Ian Waters of ThousandEyes

Ian Waters - ThousandEyes 16.9.jpg

Ian Waters, senior director of EMEA marketing, ThousandEyes, speaks to Capacity about the growing adoption of SASE in the enterprise space and the impact of Covid-19.

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformation processes and enterprises are revisiting their networking strategies. As enterprises rely more on cloud-based applications, what trends have you seen in regards to SD-WAN investment and adoption?

At ThousandEyes we have observed some of our customers re-evaluating their SD-WAN investments in light of the changes to working patterns during 2020, however this was mainly in the first phase of lockdown before the summer. More recently organisations have been adjusting their IT strategy for a hybrid future where home workers and office workers are more evenly distributed and in that environment the existing benefits of migrating to SD-WAN, namely increased capacity and flexibility, are still valid. Furthermore, we predict SD-WAN vendors will shift their focus away from security and instead look to make their solutions scalable enough to address the home office as well.

How much more are enterprises focusing in on the benefits of using a centralised software-centric model today?

Many companies have been focused on being more software-centric for some time, either in the adoption of SaaS and automation to simplify workload and business process or in developing a software and apps centric approach to how they interact with their customers. It is true that in the wide area the move to software defined networks which give centralised control and visibility has been underway for some time but there is a broader picture where these services are used as a means to reach data and applications outside of your environment and control, in fact, in that regard software and applications have never been more distributed. Although centralised management of software defined networks can simplify much of the wide area network management we encourage our customers to think of that as part of a much wider extended IT estate which requires end-to-end visibility.

What are your thoughts on Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and what does this new model mean for the enterprise sector?

SASE unifies networking and security services into a cloud-delivered service to provide access and security from edge to edge — including the data center, remote offices, roaming users, and beyond. Choosing the right vendor for SASE, with a proven track record in both networking and security SASE can simplify daily management, offer better security protection, and improve network performance. We believe as the workforce continues to be remote, or at least work flexibly, direct internet access will become more popular, and technologies such as SASE can have many benefits. From our perspective we’re excited by the many synergies ThousandEyes can have with other technologies which are part of the Cisco portfolio, such as Cisco Umbrella.

With increased M&A activity in this space, do you think the SD-WAN market will experience major consolidation over the coming years?

It’s interesting that although 2020 has been a disrupted year for many it doesn’t seem to have disrupted the rate of acquisitions and merges in the IT space, not least our own acquisition by Cisco this year, as well as other notable acquisitions such as the recent blockbuster acquisition of Slack by Salesforce. Given the explosion in SD-WAN vendors I would expect this to continue however some SD-WAN vendors that fail to innovate will also likely get left behind.

SD-WAN has been one of the most important developments in enterprise connectivity, but what other next-gen technologies are you investing in for future development and rollout?

ThousandEyes has a different perspective as a technology that people use to augment their visibility and control as they migrate to SD-WAN and Direct Indirect Access based networks. Networks will continue to need to be agile and flexible, and will need to increasingly adapt to an as-a-service model, but they are only part of an Enterprise’s connectivity. Many organisations will still maintain some MPLS, move to lot of traffic onto the Internet, have distributed home workers and rely on public cloud and SaaS providers along with a range of other 3rd party infrastructure and software providers. We feel you have to have visibility of that SD-WAN environment, on both an overlay and underlay basis, but also in context and part of a complete picture.

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