THE FUTURE OF NETWORKING

ALEXANDRE GIBOUIN, HEAD OF CONNECTIVITY DOMAIN, IMEA, ORANGE BUSINESS SERVICES, TALKS ABOUT WHY YOUR ORGANISATION NEEDS SD-WAN TO REDUCE THE COST OF CONNECTIVITY IN A CLOUD-CENTRIC WORLD.

What is driving SDWAN adoption in the Middle East?

SD-WAN adoption is increasing in the Middle East. Based on our experience of working with enterprise customers across the Middle East, we see two main drivers of the adoption of SD-WAN in the region – both are related to the impact of the pandemic.

First, the acceleration of digital transformation and the shift to the ‘digital enterprise’, for which companies need to prepare their network infrastructure ready for cloud transformation (the pandemic has accelerated this trend). Second, the need for companies to optimise the connectivity budget in order to hit cost savings targets in 2021 (an even more vital objective due to the impact of the pandemic).

We see these trends playing out with our customers operating in a range of industries, including banking and finance, manufacturing, transport and logistics, and retail. Cloud migration is driving SD-WAN transformation among our customers and when migrating, they need robust and manageable communications infrastructures to support the cloud resources on which their business processes rely.

In fact, SD-WAN is becoming an essential tool for IT departments which are increasingly becoming service brokers for a variety of SaaS applications. By using SD-WAN to manage multiple applications across different service providers, the IT department can offer a diverse portfolio of applications while managing end to end visibility and service quality over the supporting network.

Can SD-WAN replace MPLS?

In any situation, SD-WAN can help companies benefit from increased visibility, agility and resilience, while transforming their IT to a cloudbased model. The key to a successful transformation journey is the expert support and services to offer companies end to end orchestration of the edge and cloud connectivity, as well as the security and cloud services up to the application layer.

What are the SD-WAN requirements for a multi-cloud environment?

Most of our enterprise customers in the region who are moving towards the digital enterprise model have already implemented or are on the way to implementing a multi-cloud strategy.

It’s easy to see why. Enterprises across the region are facing increasing ICT challenges due to the opportunities and challenges of digital transformation, and the disruption and complexity of ‘tech sprawl’. Digital transformation also disrupts IT departments, as technologies and vendors multiply and complexity increases. Enterprises increasingly want more data and so seek more technology, adding even more services, vendors and contracts and this will increase as cloud and digital services grow. Of course, it’s not a uniform shift to the cloud and companies are migrating at different rates mirroring the local country regulatory developments - but the major cloud service providers are now in the region and regulators are increasingly looking at the opportunities and advantages of cloud as a driver of digital business transformation, placing data at the heart of the business.

Companies which have already moved to the cloud expect the communication infrastructure to deliver best-in-class user experience through efficient solutions, which are more agile and responsive to business demands. Because a significant part of the traffic is transported over the internet, security is also a key factor.

We can see the sectors that are transforming at the fastest rates and not surprisingly, these include retail, retail banking, transport & logistics, all of which are very active. In the banking sector for example, cloud migration and digital transformation starts at the first level which covers the non-banking applications and offers flexible costs and a basis for unified communications services in the cloud. Beyond this, the next level involves a shift of the datacenter to the public cloud and moves the network from Software-as-a-Service to Platform-as-a-Service.

But the concern we hear regularly is that when moving applications to the

cloud, there may be a corresponding loss of visibility and control.

This is where the benefits of SD-WAN transformation really start to kick-in. These include additional flexibility, agility and scalability. The value proposition for SD-WAN is taking back control and even if the transformation process is underway, SD-WAN can be retrofitted to ensure you can monitor performance and accelerate your network transformation.

Orange Business Services has deployed a global Software Defined Platform, called NextGen Hub available in 24 locations (including three locations in the Middle East & Africa region). This facilitates the move to a multi-cloud strategy by combining direct connectivity to 40 major cloud service providers (including Microsoft, Amazon, SAP, Salesforce, Google, Oracle) , using our Galerie platform and the power of SD-WAN and SDN technology for optimised Edge to cloud connectivity, using our Flexible SDWAN platform.

Many of our customers are considering SD-WAN technology as a key enabler to achieving their goals and are already assessing or have selected an SD-WAN technology solution.

We also provide a vendor agnostic multi-cloud connectivity fabric, fully secure, resilient and scalable, combined with an intelligent application-centric edge to the cloud platform, to optimise the ‘user to Apps’ experience, with applications distributed in multiple clouds and locations and with users more connected over the internet, whether they are working from the office or from home.

What some of the key SD-WAN trends to watch for in 2021?

We believe SD WAN is one of the most exciting and fastest growing network technologies with the potential to revolutionise business. Gartner predicts 59 percent compound annual growth rate for SD WAN through 2021, creating a $1.3 billion market. It also predicts a 6.3 percent annual decline in branch office routers, and a 28.1 percent annual reduction in legacy routers through 2020.

A recent study conducted by IDC for Riverbed, ‘Middle East Network Transformation Survey 2020’, mentions that organisations in the UAE and Saudi Arabia are investing in upgrading their networks and currently over half (52%) are undergoing network transformation. 2021 is set to be a big year for SD-WAN as the technology continues to mature. We anticipate that the main evolution next year will be around the convergence of SD-WAN and security services, in a cloud delivery model. Our own response to this has been to align our service portfolio with the so-called Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) framework, defined with Gartner.

While enterprise users are moving out of the office and moving applications to the public cloud, our customers are looking for integrated and orchestrated SD-WAN and security solutions end to end, to connect and protect the end user, as well as the applications.

Edge transformation is another important trend that we expect to continue in 2021, combining SD-WAN, SD-LAN and Edge computing solutions to support IoT transformation use cases such as Smart Retail, Smart Building and Industry 4.0. Large enterprise customers are making this digital integration journey with a co-innovation approach and are actively looking for partners with the experience of successful implementations in different vertical industries.

So, it’s clear – the world really is moving towards a more software defined future. As cloud adoption continues to accelerate in the region, softwaredefined networking simplifies the management and operation of global infrastructure and improves cost, reliability and security.