The pace of software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WANs) developments continues to accelerate for several reasons. One fundamental reason is that SD-WAN is not only programmable from a feature support perspective, it is also secure. Factor in the pace of applications that are moving to the cloud, and it is not surprising that the ability to program software security services into a connectivity service has rapidly become a strategic imperative.

In order to understand the associated SD-WAN security business drivers and technical requirements, Heavy Reading launched the "SD-WAN Security Market Leadership Study (MLS)" with collaboration partners Amdocs, Fortinet, Lavelle Networks and Nuage Networks in Q4 2019. The survey attracted 90 qualified global respondents and documented SD-WAN security service use cases, implementation timelines, cloud service integration opportunities, the role of automation, and policy, as well as technical requirements, including future success requirements.

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Security is strategic
The rapid evolution and demand for SD-WAN services have enabled communications service providers (CSPs) to integrate high value security services into their SD-WAN portfolio. One reason security represents such a high value proposition is that there is a broad range of security services supported.

These range from virtual firewalls (vFirewalls) to secured SD branches (which apply advanced management tools), packet filters and even virtualized session borders controllers (vSBC). As illustrated in Figure 1, based on "extremely important" responses, the top four capabilities are vFirewall (40%), intrusion prevention (35%), DDoS mitigation (34%) and secured SD branch (30%).