The pandemic has fundamentally changed how and where people work and the way enterprise WANs are architected, according to Aryaka’s sixth-annual State of the WAN report.

The report surveyed 1,600 global enterprises spanning a broad spectrum of industries ranging from software and technology to manufacturing, retail, and business services. It identified four key trends reshaping the WAN market: remote and hybrid work, a growing appetite for managed services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, increased complexity associated with cloud migrations and other cost-saving measures, and, of course, network security.

At face value, none of these trends are all that surprising nearly two years into the pandemic, admits Aryaka CMO Shashi Kiran. However, the speed and numbers at which enterprises are embracing these trends is telling, he argues.

Branch Offices Gives Way to Kitchen Tables

In the wake of the pandemic, workers around the world said goodbye to their offices and cubicles and set up shop at their kitchen tables, home offices, and beds.

According to the report, the past two years have changed the way enterprises think about remote and hybrid work, and many are now opting out of physical locations altogether. Roughly 25% of respondents reported they closed or planned to close 25% to 50% of their branch offices in favor of remote work models. A similar number of respondents reported that between 51% and 75% of their workforce would likely remain remote even post pandemic.

“We're seeing a majority of enterprises large and small making hybrid the de-facto option and putting that as a permanent policy,” Kiran said, adding that many enterprises have gone so far as to terminate their leases and go 100% remote.

The shift to remote work also introduced an element of unpredictability to bandwidth requirements. According to Kiran, branch bandwidth consumption dwindled in 2021, but the need to absorb spikes in demand surged.

“The contracts that are being negotiated have more to do with how can you have spikes when there is a certain demand, and how can I shift the pricing model and operational model to accommodate that,” he added.

SASE In Vogue

The pandemic brought with it a seemingly endless stream of demoralizing headlines, and when they weren’t about our modern plague or the election, they frequently centered on high-profile cybersecurity breaches and ransomware attacks.

With the shift to remote work came the rise of Gartner’s then-fresh secure access service edge (SASE) product category. Two years later it's clear SASE is the way forward, but many enterprises aren’t sure how to get there, Aryaka reports.

Respondents ranked securing a remote workforce above both staffing and internal threats as the top security challenge facing their business today.

Despite a COVID-19-fueled kickstart, Aryaka reports just 24% of respondents have deployed a SASE, while another 40% said they planned to do so in the next year.

However, the complexity of migrating to SASE and questions over whether to deploy a single- or multi-vendor architecture continue to dog the technology, the report found.

Enterprises Turn to Managed Services

That complexity hasn’t gone anyway, though the shift to remote work and adoption of SASE has changed this dynamic somewhat, Kiran noted.

SD-WAN vendors have long touted the technology’s application- and policy-based routing capabilities as the antidote to network performance and complexity. However, customers are increasingly looking for ways to offload that complexity and consolidate services under a single roof.

“There’s a fragmented value chain for SD-WAN, which we’ve seen before and now for SASE as well,” Kiran said.

Of those surveyed, 45% said they were considering a consolidated SASE architecture, up from 39% last year.

However, enterprises' managed services appetite doesn't stop at SD-WAN or SASE. Respondents expressed a desire for managed last-mile and multi-cloud connectivity. “There is inherent complexity in all of these areas and having something that is managed and delivered as a service appears to be important,” Kiran said.

The Cloud, SaaS Apps Breed Complexity

“Application performance and managing network complexity have been named the top two challenges in every one of our annual reports,” the report says. This year was no different.

According to Aryaka, one of the driving forces behind this challenge is a desire to cut costs and reallocate budgets to address more immediate priorities. Two common items on the chopping block were costly MPLS circuits and on-premises data centers.

To this end, a third of respondents reported more than half of their applications now run in the cloud. And for the first time cost overtook complexity was the primary motivator behind SD-WAN adoption.

This, Kiran said, puts increased pressure on enterprises' WANs to ensure application performance and reliability. But as enterprises move away from on-premises workloads to those hosted in the cloud or offered as a service, it introduces challenges for visibility and performance.