The pull for SDWAN and SASE

There is an unwavering evolution in network infrastructure, with a shift towards multi-cloud application strategies, need for consistent performance, security across all locations, increase in number of devices and hybrid work models.

For businesses the challenge of supporting a more dynamic distributed work environment is growing in importance day by day as well. Also, there is a continuous focus from Technology leaders of organizations to extend Zero trust access across all aspects – users, devices and applications.

Generative AI and its evolution to Agentic is enabling networks to be even more powerful and be even more resilient. Our discussions with technology leaders are pointing towards a direction wherein Network & Security convergence and central observability and AI enabled incident management is becoming a key focus area.

We are noticing a significant pull towards SDWAN & SASE, as these solutions enable organizations to have an application centric secure network infrastructure with complete visibility into entire network environment. Leading Analyst firms also do not have a differentiated opinion to what we are witnessing hence substantiating the fact that our observation resonates with the market sentiment and the market pull.

According to Gartner, The SASE Market is expected to reach $41 Bn by 2030 growing at a CAGR of 24%. Also, the market size for SDWAN either alone or as part of SASE architecture is expected to be a ~$ 9 BN size by 2028.

How organizations should look at SDWAN & SASE Adoption: The Use case & Challenges approach

For organizations it is important to take a use case approach when they go in for a SDWAN and SASE Deployment. Also, businesses now deploy bulk of applications and services in public and private clouds which means application traffic is no longer confined to the enterprise. Legacy hub and spoke networks cannot support dynamic workloads and diverse data flows. Different applications require different quality of service requirements (QoS)

Hence businesses while working with their technology transformation partners should take all of these factors into consideration & adopt a dimensional approach. They need to look at their business problems, look at what use cases they are looking to achieve and balance well the challenges that lie in an enterprise network

The illustration below highlights the dimensional approach that technology leaders should look at: -

Key to success lies in closely balancing the use cases and challenges and work with your transformation partner in developing a network infrastructure that is custom built to meet your requirements. Also, we believe that SDWAN and SASE Transformations need a more Framework & automation-based approach to deployment.

Legacy processes to transformation are time consuming. Hence it means that SDWAN and SASE transformations take time and businesses have to wait to get the benefits out of these transformations.

Not anymore. We at HCLTech have looked at “How we can bring down the time to deployment for our customers and enable them to take benefits quickly”

Introducing HCLTech’s SDWAN and SASE Factory?

The factory model brings in an Industrialized and automated approach to SDWAN and SASE deployment by bringing in significant standardization & automation in Ingestion and Design, Angestion & intake, network & security policies and how we blueprint and standardize models and templates.

It marks significant proprietary methodologies that include configuration templates and automated configuration processes that we have developed at: a) Plan and Design b) Provision and Deploy c) Monitor and Manage d) Optimize & Secure e) Scale & move stages

The net result is 30-40% Faster deployment with defined outcome-based deployment.

The Factory model brings together the following:-

What do Businesses get? Intended business benefits

Businesses get a host of benefits that include 30-40% faster deployment, significant performance gain, direct ~40% Opex savings and rapid deployment of new sites. The Factory model offers automated per-staging, ZTP Deployments and the ability to detect and automate new threats using real time policy enforcing.

Also, our significant focus on AI, Agentic Led operations, offers noticeable improvements in Managed services SLA along with Automated Incident Management.

To know more about our SDWAN and SASE Factory .. write to us at NextGenNetworksBU@hcltech.com