Hypothetical scenario: You've thoroughly audited your wide area network and it's a well-oiled machine.
You understand how your current configuration matches against your budget. You've developed new performance goals. You have a few expansion plans in mind for the future, but for now, you're happy with how things are running. The systems you have in place meet your company's needs.
What's next?
What's driving the shift to SD-WAN?
While there is no one single reason for SD-WAN's rise, cost savings is a major motivation cited by the WAN managers we've connected with at our WAN Summits and through our annual WAN Manager Survey.
Listen—the allure of dramatically reducing network spend is strong.
We've made it to that slow and hazy last week of July. Seems like a good time to shake things up and share some free research.
Fact: you can sample the data that fuels blog posts like this and this and this. Keep scrolling to browse report content that's currently available to download at no cost.
Around three in four enterprises that responded to our latest WAN Manager Survey reported having more than one infrastructure as a service (IaaS) partner. Azure and AWS were easily the most frequently cited by participants; 60% were using one or both of these providers.
With this in mind, how are enterprises connecting to their IaaS providers and why would you select one method over another? And what's the global geographic distribution of cloud providers looking like these days?
With the rising adoption of cloud services, IT leaders are evolving their networks to address new requirements and realize cost savings.
This is what we'll be covering when we join the experts at Calero MDSL for a webinar on August 5. (And you know we'll be bringing our latest SD-WAN pricing data.)
For several months now, much of the world has transitioned to remote work.
Where possible, knowledge workers have set up shop in home offices or kitchens or bedrooms, logging into virtual private networks and leaning on cloud services to keep business running uninterrupted.
"In previous iterations of the WAN, you might have seen one large MPLS cloud, but with core sites having a larger MPLS port than edge sites. Now we're seeing a lot more technology differentiation between core versus middle tier versus edge sites."
A self-proclaimed "data guy," TeleGeography Senior Analyst and Data Science Manager Mike Bisaha has spent years building tools to help IT managers better understand the performance, design, and cost of their networks.
And he's learned a lot about what the modern WAN looks like in the process.
The first challenge in sourcing internet is deciding what you need. It's finding a balance between cost and performance that's so important. Because in an internet world you're going to have a lot more choice than in an MPLS world.
This advice comes from Globalinternet Chief Portfolio Officer Mike Lloyd.
Greg Bryan has a microphone, a seemingly endless supply of data, and the phone numbers of some prominent WAN experts.
Sounds like the recipe for a podcast to me.
Copyright © 2025 TeleGeography.
