51% of enterprises in Australia plan to deploy SD-WAN in the next 12-24 months, with banking and financial services companies holding the greatest deployment potential, according to a Frost - Sullivan global end-user market survey sponsored by Silver Peak.

The survey revealed that 55% of Australian respondents intend to replace existing branch routers with an SD-WAN appliance that supports routing functionality during this time.

The survey was conducted by Frost - Sullivan to gain insights into the current mindset of enterprise IT decision makers regarding SD-WAN market trends and their impact on enterprise WAN architectures.

The study included responses from 850 individual companies across five industries and spanned eight key countries around the world - 150 respondents came from Australia and New Zealand.

The study revealed the top three reasons that Australian companies are turning to SD-WAN are to deploy new branch sites faster; apply granular security policies; and achieve superior WAN and application performance.

These organisations are embracing SD-WAN appliances with integrated routing and WAN optimisation functions while keeping existing customer premises equipment (CPE)-based solutions at other sites until maintenance contracts expire.

The survey results affirm that SD-WAN is a high technology priority for enterprises in Australia in the next 12-24 months, alongside hybrid cloud services and network and application security.

“This isn't surprising as these three technologies are intertwined and directly support the top business driver of improving the overall customer experience,” says Frost - Sullivan Australia and New Zealand managing director Mark Dougan.

“What is surprising, however, is the mindset regarding various WAN functions while evaluating SD-WAN, especially the intent of Australian organisations to replace CPE routers with an SD-WAN appliance with integrated routing functionality.

Other key findings include:

• Cloud security gains increasing appeal – Australian respondents are looking to embrace cloud-based security services supported by their SD-WAN vendor, to retire or augment CPE-based firewall solutions at different company sites. 62% of Australian respondents indicated that they plan to service chain cloud-based security services with their SD-WAN solution.

• WAN optimisation remains critical – Despite the hype about SD-WAN making WAN optimisation redundant, a significant number of Australian respondents indicated that WAN optimisation remains critical for them. They either want WAN optimisation as an integrated function with SD-WAN (71%) or at a minimum for the SD-WAN solution to interoperate with their existing solution (67%).

"As Australian companies adopt SD-WAN, they're shifting from a traditional router-centric WAN model toward a business-first model that ensures resiliency and business continuity, while delivering superior WAN and application performance," says Silver Peak ANZ regional director Graham Schultz.

“Enterprises also want to integrate network functions at the WAN edge to reduce complexity and cost. Unified WAN optimisation and other unique capabilities make the Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform ideally suited to address the challenges facing highly distributed organisations throughout Australia.