Network complexity remains the biggest barrier to enterprises as they implement SD-WAN, according to Aryaka’s 2020 State of the WAN report. The vendor’s fourth-annual report surveyed roughly 1,100 IT and networking professionals working for enterprises around the world.

According to the report, 37% of respondents named complexity as their No. 1 SD-WAN challenge. Complexity was followed closely by on-premises performance (32%), slow cloud access and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications (32%), security (31%), and deployment times (30%).

There is an “understanding that it's [complexity] impacting application performance, it’s impacting the performance of the cloud applications, it’s impacting how remote workers are coming into the network,” said David Ginsberg, VP of product and solutions marketing at Aryaka Networks, in an interview with SDxCentral.

Complexity continued to plague unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS), and while the majority of respondents reported that set up and maintenance was the No. 1 issue, lag, delay, and dropped calls remained widespread issues.

Making matters worse, the majority of enterprises surveyed were using more than 10 SaaS applications, and Aryaka reports that a growing number of enterprises are using more than 100. Many of these companies also report running applications in multiple clouds, including Amazon Web Service (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud.

According to Aryaka, as enterprises continue to shift workloads to the cloud and increasingly rely on SaaS apps, IT teams are spending more time trying to address the associated performance challenges. And while, for now, connecting remote and mobile workers to the SD-WAN is the biggest time suck for IT teams surveyed, Aryaka reports that the amount of time spent on cloud access more than doubled from 20% in 2019, to 42% in 2020.

Aryaka also noted that automation has taken center stage as enterprises have taken steps to address complexity and reduce the amount of time spent managing the WAN. As such, the use of automation initiatives rose to 41% in 2020 from 31% the previous year.

The survey also found enterprises, independent of size, had been investigating technologies like IoT, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and blockchain as potential cures to their complexity conundrums. Each of these initiatives saw strong growth in the past year. Of those surveyed 27% said their company was investigating AI/ML, while 29% they were looking to IoT. Meanwhile, blockchain saw the largest jump in interest with just 5% of respondents expressing interest in the tech in 2019, to more than 20% in 2020.

Aryaka also found a growing number of enterprises are investigating 5G as a primary WAN link, with 42% of respondents naming it as the top initiative for the year. “5G was a new question that we asked this year,” explained Ginsberg. “A lot of people are looking at it as a future primary connection.”

Since last year’s report, Aryaka says the majority of enterprises have yet to bite the bullet on SD-WAN. The survey found 44% of respondents were still in the process of gathering information in preparation for a deployment while 23% were actively evaluating vendors.

Only 13% of respondents were actively in the process of deploying an SD-WAN.

Cloud, WAN optimization, and advanced security remained key features among those surveyed, but a growing number of respondents expressed interest in NFV, support for remote workers, and a preference for managed service offerings.