NSS Labs announced that it is developing the next iteration of its Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) Group Test. As part of today’s announcement, NSS Labs is also issuing a call for industry engagement from both enterprises and SD-WAN vendors to help shape and evolve its upcoming test and methodology.
Adoption of SD-WAN has reached an inflection point and nearly every distributed business is deploying, evaluating, or planning to implement an SD-WAN product as part of its IT vision. 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 US enterprises surveyed indicate that their organizations have adopted or will adopt SD-WAN technology in the next 12 months. Of the enterprises currently deploying SD-WAN products, 52.9% plan on expanding their use of the technology.2
Earlier this year NSS Labs performed the industry’s first group test of SD-WAN products and produced the most comprehensive technical research available on the market today. In this groundbreaking test, nine SD-WAN products were examined through hundreds of hours of rigorous testing. The 2018 SD-WAN Group Test includes detailed individual Test Reports for nine products, plus three Comparative Reports: the TCO Comparative Report, Performance Comparative Report, and Value Matrix Comparative Report.
NSS Labs research indicates that the SD-WAN market will continue to evolve, and both SD-WAN and security will become integral components of the modern WAN Edge architecture. As part of the 2018 SD-WAN Group Test, some of the key capabilities that were assessed by NSS Labs included:
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
“SD-WAN is becoming increasingly mainstream and the products tested in the 2018 NSS Labs SD-WAN Group Test offer some impressive capabilities for enterprises and service providers,” said Jason Brvenik, Chief Technology Officer at NSS Labs. “We encourage enterprises and vendors to collaborate with us as we continue to examine leading SD-WAN products in the market.