Aryaka Study: Network Transformation, Cloud Services Demand Keep Momentum in 2023
Aryaka's study posits that the macroeconomic downturn is fueling adoption of as-a-service, cloud technologies.
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Aryaka interviewed 230 IT and networking professionals who have budget authority within their organizations.
Fifty-six percent came from the C-level, including chief financial officer. Thirty-five percent came from the director level, and 10% were at the vice president level.
The respondents came from the U.S. (128), the U.K., Germany and India.
The vast majority (98%) of customers said they plan to invest in and depend more on cloud networking and security services.
That answer could come as a surprise to those reading all the layoff stories coming from the public cloud providers. In addition to hyperscalers like AWS announcing significant cuts, a debate has been raging on the end user side about the value of public cloud services. However, not all cloud seems to be facing the same consternation, at least according to this survey.
Asked how economic conditions were impacting cloud infrastructure and services adoption, 47% of IT professionals said they were accelerating adoption of cloud and network solutions. Another 28% said they were focusing on specific solutions in order to save money.
Only 19% said they were slowing their cloud adoption.
The study pointed to a growth in network technology being consumed as a service.
Ninety-five percent of C-level executives queried said managed services, and more specifically, network-as-a-service (NaaS), will play a bigger role for the remainder of 2023.
Other industry analysis is validating that trend. ABI Research recently predicted the NaaS market to exceed $150 billion by 2030. The larger movement away from capital-intensive hardware and the talent shortage are playing a part in that uptick.
Sixty-five percent of Aryaka’s respondents cited “knowledge and expertise” as their biggest challenge. That challenge trailed behind the complexity of building and managing networks (85%). Fifty-eight percent listed cost as a key challenge.
“All of these challenges – complexity, expertise, cost, and time – are issues that can be addressed by MSPs, which can build specialized networks at scale,” Aryaka wrote in its report. “Many organizations do not have the time, expertise, and resources to address these types of networks at scale.”
It’s a worthy disclaimer that Aryaka provides managed SD-WAN and SASE services.
It’s not a new sentiment to say that many enterprise customer want to move away from carrier-managed MPLS networks, but Aryaka’s study demonstrates the urge well.
Sixty-two percent of IT professionals said they have established plans to eliminate their MPLS network. Only 7% want to invest in it more. Another 29% say they will continue operating their MPLS network but won’t expand it.
When it came to SD-WAN, a slight plurality (44%) of respondents said they preferred to buy SD-WAN from a telco. A similar number (41%) preferred a non-telco SD-WAN provider. Fourteen percent said they preferred to use both telco and non-telco providers of SD-WAN.
A November 2022 IDC/GTT study found that 47% of enterprises have migrated from MPLS to SD-WAN.
The image above comes from Aryaka’s study.
The SD-WAN market in many respects has evolved into the secure access service edge (SASE) market, with networking/SD-WAN vendors adding advanced security to their platforms. On the other hand, the secure service edge (SSE) providers are also trying to establish themselves in the SASE market, offering a variety of advanced security services.
Aryaka asked respondents to rate which cybersecurity component of SASE is their most pressing priority to integrate into their platform.
Thirty-percent of respondents chose cloud access security broker (CASB) as their first or second priority. Then came zero-trust network access (ZTNA), secure web gateway (SWG) and advanced threat protection, all garnering 25%.
Channel Futures’ latest survey of technology advisors (agents) saw growth in both network and cybersecurity services.
Thirty-one percent of agents reported a slight year-over-year increase in SD-WAN related technologies in the fourth quarter. Another 39% reported an increase in wireline network related sales. Commoditization does remain a very real challenge, but many partners say their efforts serving multilocation customers with NaaS continues to pay dividends.
At the same time, cybersecurity sales are taking off in the technology advisor community, with 44% saying cybersecurity grew for them in Q4.
Channel Futures’ latest survey of technology advisors (agents) saw growth in both network and cybersecurity services.
Thirty-one percent of agents reported a slight year-over-year increase in SD-WAN related technologies in the fourth quarter. Another 39% reported an increase in wireline network related sales. Commoditization does remain a very real challenge, but many partners say their efforts serving multilocation customers with NaaS continues to pay dividends.
At the same time, cybersecurity sales are taking off in the technology advisor community, with 44% saying cybersecurity grew for them in Q4.
The recession isn’t deterring enterprises from investing in cloud services and network transformation, according to a recent survey by Aryaka Networks.
The vendor in its 2023 Report on Enterprise Network Transformation argued that the report of cloud’s demise may indeed be greatly exaggerated. Forty-seven percent of the 230 enterprises IT leaders surveyed said they plan to accelerate their adoption of cloud services.
“Regardless of the short-term direction of the economy, the survey ratifies the belief in long-term themes — technology leaders see a crucial need for cloud investment, hybrid work, the need for better applications performance, the need for better security, the decline of MPLS and the the arrival of NaaS as key long-term investments,” wrote the report’s authors.
Aryaka also touched on how customers are evolving toward secure access service edge (SASE) platforms. Those aforementioned platforms bring together advanced networking and remote access features – particularly software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) – with advanced security features – now known as security service edge. Aryaka asked its customers which cybersecurity features they feel most pressed to adopt, and secure web gateway came out on top.
The network transformation study replaces Aryaka’s annual State of the WAN report.
Channel Futures summarized some of the key findings from the survey in the slides above.
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