HITS
NSS Labs Announces Industry’s First SD-WAN Group Test Results (HITS)
Story Highlights
NSS Labs announced the results of the industry’s first Software Defined-Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) Group Test. In this groundbreaking, inaugural test, nine of the industry’s leading SD-WAN products were examined to help enterprises understand the merits of products in the market and identify the capabilities best suited to meet their use case requirements.
SD-WAN is becoming increasingly mainstream and the products validated in the 2018 NSS Labs SD-WAN group test offer some impressive capabilities for enterprises and service providers.
The capabilities that were assessed by NSS Labs include:
Remote Initial Configuration
WAN Impairment and Link Failover
Dynamic Path Selection with SLA Measurements
Path Conditioning and Application-Aware Steering
Link Saturation and Congestion
Application-Aware Traffic Steering
Performance by Application Flows
Raw Packet Processing Performance – UDP Throughput and UDP Latency
Maximum Capacity
HTTP Capacity and limits
Application-Aware Response Time
Security Effectiveness
While security effectiveness was not included in the final scores, it was evaluated in products offering security capabilities.
Adoption of SD-WAN has reached an inflection point and nearly every distributed business is deploying, evaluating, or planning to implement an SD-WAN as part of its IT vision. The traditional WAN architecture is becoming increasingly expensive and ineffective as the adoption of cloud-based applications is changing the type of traffic remote branch offices are experiencing.
This growth in the adoption of cloud-based applications, be they software-as a service (SaaS) or applications hosted in an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), also disrupts the prominence of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS)-based WAN connectivity to the branch.
The global market intelligence firm IDC estimates that the SD-WAN market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 69%, reaching $8 billion by 2021.1 According to an NSS Labs research survey, 87.8% of U.S. enterprises surveyed indicate that their organization have or will adopt SD-WAN in the next 12 months. Of the enterprises currently deploying SD-WAN, 52.9% plan on expanding their use of the technology.
