By Dipesh Ranjan, APAC Head, NetFoundry

Businesses in Asia Pacific (APAC) are actively considering increasing their investments in networking technologies based on the cloud.

In a study by technology analyst firm IDC they claimed that worldwide SD-WAN infrastructure and services revenues will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 69.6%, to reach $8.05bn in 2021. That is an impressive figure.

IDC says that in Southeast Asia, almost 56% of organisations have already deployed, or are planning to deploy, SD-WAN. Almost 30% of those surveyed singled out the policy-based control and WAN optimisation capabilities of SD-WAN as top drivers for implementing the technology.

IDC Asia-Pacific says that most WAN traffic today – to and from branch and remote sites – is destined for the cloud on either hosted applications or public cloud.

It’s not surprising, since the old-fashioned WAN was designed to start at branch level and end at the datacenter and was never designed to support the sheer complexity of cloud–driven traffic. IDC pointed out in their survey that organisations which are still using traditional networks are facing major challenges on performance and operational difficulties.

The network node has to support vast numbers of new applications and massively growing business units as organisations expand, diversify and respond to the new problems and workloads such as the Internet of things (IoT).

However, most of APAC CIOs and CTOs feel that SD-WAN has been overhyped and that it’s not yet solving top networking issues such as deploying applications to the cloud, hybrid cloud set-ups and Industrial IoT devices in way that is on demand and gremlin-free.

While the IaaS market has been growing due to its ability to provision resources quickly, the network as we know it is losing out. Netfoundry addresses this problem by helping enterprises to deploy zero-trust application specific networks across multi-cloud and multi-edge environments.

NetFoundry has been able to move beyond the traditional SD-WAN formula and has innovated a cloud-native platform which gives clients not only the ability to instantly connect a fully software-only application-based networks in cloud and IoT ecosystems but also to achieve 3 to 5 times higher performance on their underlay network. For example, NetFoundry can provision Internet with 5 layers of security built in to keep enterprises safe from DDoS attacks while connecting them to any provider, such as AWS or AZURE, from anywhere, anytime using any underlay internet provider.

Many organisations still have a naïve belief in their traditional technology and either the fear of failure, or lack of imagination, drives them away from adoption of software-defned network technology. Early evangelists are few and far between but they are reaping the benefits of the new networking paradigm and will shape the future of APAC networking in the same way that it transformed the cloud-scape over last decade.

Dave Ulmer, Head of Digital, MD Pictures, the leading Indonesian movie production company said: “As one of the largest film production companies in ASIA, MD pictures was looking for an agile yet powerful solution to migrate our applications and large data files to AWS.  NetFoundry has enabled us to do this quickly and securely without the need for