TeleGeography’s latest WAN Manager Survey finds DIA usage increased by 15% in four years, while MPLS dropped by 36% over the same time period.
Washington, D.C., 9 January 2022 – TeleGeography, a global telecommunications market research and consulting firm, has released its 2021 WAN Manager Survey, revealing that DIA is hot on the heels of MPLS, with 42% of average sites running the product in 2021.
At the same time, survey responses show a clear downtrend in MPLS use, from a dominant high of 82% of sites running the product in 2018 down to 46% in 2021. This marks the first time this figure has dropped below half of average sites.
TeleGeography’s report highlights how the extension of COVID-related remote work has accelerated many ongoing WAN trends like migration to the cloud, SD-WAN adoption, and incorporation of alternative access technologies into the underlay. To that effect, the team found that DIA and business broadband usage have been on the rise, with DIA experiencing a four-year CAGR increase of 3% and broadband logging an increase of 1.5%.
“Through our survey, we can see that enterprise companies are embracing hybrid networks more and more. MPLS usage in our respondents’ WAN has been declining steadily, and in 2021 we saw a near-equal ratio of MPLS and DIA in the average network. Given these rates, we’ll have an eye on DIA usage to perhaps overtake MPLS in future surveys,” said Elizabeth Thorne, Senior Analyst at TeleGeography.
TeleGeography’s new survey also reveals WAN managers’ views on zero trust security (ZTS) and secure access service edge (SASE) adoption. ZTS adoption is on the rise, growing from just 8% of respondents in 2019 to 35% in 2021, a significant increase in just two years.
“Enterprise networking is evolving, in part due to an increase in remote working. Network managers are facing the challenge of accommodating a remote-friendly, work-from-anywhere environment and many will likely be moving toward internet-first networks and further away from MPLS in the coming years,” said Greg Bryan, Senior Manager at TeleGeography.
TeleGeography’s WAN Manager Survey features analysis based on the experiences of WAN managers from 185 companies with a median revenue of $10 billion USD. The 2021 focuses on IT managers whose day-to-day role covers designing, sourcing, and managing U.S. national, regional, and global corporate wide area computer networks. It also includes 60 new responses across various industries.
You can download a copy of the executive summary here: https://www2.telegeography.com/download-the-wan-manager-survey-executive-summary
About TeleGeography
TeleGeography is a telecommunications market research and consulting firm that conducts indepth research, compiles large data sets, and presents this information in easy-to-use online reports and databases. Their primary research areas include enterprise MPLS VPN, Ethernet, dedicated internet access, and international private line service providers and pricing.
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