Barracuda Networks’ Dr. Klaus Gheri explains why businesses are investing in SD-WAN to access the cloud quickly and securely.
It’s important to stay in tune with the industry’s successes, and of course its struggles too. As part of this, Barracuda recently surveyed over 400 IT and networking professionals in the EMEA region in order to understand their wide area networking environment and the current challenges the region faces.
As a whole, the results revealed that EMEA businesses are increasingly investing in software defined wide area networking (SD-WAN), a technology that helps users access the cloud quickly and securely. However, the picture was not perfect; the study also showed an overall lack of education and skills relating to cloud-friendly networking technologies that hindered EMEA businesses’ SD-WAN adoption.
Barracuda asked respondents to label their top priorities and reducing the risk of cyber attacks for organisations came out on top for 52%. This is unsurprising considering the fiscal and reputational damage that follows a data breach, not to mention the media storm that surrounds it.
The decision to make security the number one priority saw options such as projects deploying artificial intelligence ( AI), machine learning ( ML), automation and Internet of Things ( IoT) as less of a priority, showing that businesses understand the need to consolidate their security strategy before embarking on more innovative projects.
Yet, whilst security was highlighted as the one to watch, it was also tipped as the biggest challenge when using cloud applications, with just under half (47%) labelling it as their number one issue. The biggest wide area network (WAN) challenge was performance to the cloud, with four in ten (42%) voting it as their top issue.
To solve these security challenges across the cloud and WAN environment, EMEA organisations are enlisting the help of SD-WAN. Our findings show that one in four (26%) have SD-WAN deployed, with a further 64% either deploying or considering deploying in the future, leaving just 7% with no SD-WAN plans at all.
