Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019.  Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Pej Roshan, VP of Products and Marketing, Teridion

What Lies Ahead for MPLS, Cloud and SD-WAN

With another year under our belts, changes in the New Year will abound for cloud and SD-WAN, but not as much for MPLS as one might think. Here are my 2019 predictions on some of these topics. 

1.  MPLS is unfashionable, but it's here for the long haul. MPLS has become a four letter word with the advent of SD-WAN, but it isn't going away any time soon. Customer dissatisfaction with MPLS is overhyped. For a variety of reasons, including perceptions of regulatory compliance and a conservative approach to ensuring the performance and availability of mission critical services across the WAN, enterprises still have compelling reasons to lean on MPLS for their mission critical traffic. MPLS replacement isn't happening, but MPLS augmentation with SD-WAN continues to strike a good compromise.

2.  Enterprises rapidly move to cloud, but slowly. It's hard to find an enterprise today that doesn't have a "cloud strategy," but in many cases that boils down to rolling out Office 365. Customers will continue to dip a toe in the water by using the cloud for commodity and productivity services, but will keep the truly mission critical services in house until they are confident that the Internet - or an Internet overlay - is up to the task.

3.  The cloud is the new data center, so the Internet is the new LAN. Applications and workloads are shifting to the cloud, but users didn't move, and their expectations didn't change. Increasingly, the Internet is the critical network between the user and the applications, supplanting the LAN. Technologies that aim to overcome the inherent performance issues of the Internet to enable better SaaS and cloud access will proliferate and see broad acceptance in the market.

4.  SD-WAN adoption continues to grow, but significant segments still need help with it. "SD-WAN" has come to mean different things to different people today, and there are a lot of sweeping claims from different vendors about the problems it solves. It's hard for enterprise IT to separate the signal from the noise. Add to that the often complicated implementation, configuration and maintenance threatened by an SD-WAN deployment, and many CIOs will be gun-shy about making a transition. In order to offload the risk, simplify deployment, and prevent vendor lock-in, expect to see managed SD-WAN and network-based SD-WAN drive growth here.

5.  The cloud edge goes mainstream and SD-WAN becomes the delivery platform for it. The advent of cloud edge services holds the promise of agile, scalable apps deployed close to enterprise sites. The potential is there for the enterprise to introduce new applications and capabilities without the need for new hardware appliances or servers deployed on site. You'll see SD-WAN continue to evolve and add "on ramp to the cloud edge" to their capabilities.

6. Don't kid yourself, it's a multicloud world. Amazon, Google, and Azure all claim their networks are awesome and by connecting to them, enterprises will have an awesome experience. But aside from aversion to vendor lock-in, more and more enterprises will conclude that they can get the best results - and the lowest risks - from a multicloud approach. Distributing workloads across multiple cloud networks exponentially reduces the chance of downtime.

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About the Author

Pejman Roshan is the Vice President of Products and Marketing for Teridion, Inc.  Prior to Teridion he ran product management for Aruba's Cloud Services business unit, responsible for delivery of Aruba's cloud networking offering, Aruba Central.  Mr. Roshan joined Aruba from Shoretel, where he was the vice president of product management at ShoreTel, responsible for ShoreTel's cloud and on-premises unified communications product lines.

He joined ShoreTel with ShoreTel's acquisition of Agito Networks, where he was the co-founder and chief marketing officer.  Before founding Agito, he held various product management and leadership roles in Cisco Systems Wireless Networking Business Unit.

Roshan's accomplishments include authoring several protocol and design patents.  He was very active with 802.11 wireless LANs, participating in the IEEE 802.11 task groups responsible for security (802.11i) and QoS (802.11e) and co-authoring ‘802.11 Wireless LAN Fundamentals', published by Cisco Press in 2004.

Roshan holds a bachelor's degree in Business Administration from California Polytechnic (Cal Poly) University.