Industry Insights
Industry Insights
3 SD-WAN Myths (And the Real Story Behind Them)
By Versa Staff
Versa Networks
October 25, 2016
The growth of software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) has created new opportunities for distributed enterprises to better manage their WAN environments, but it has also given rise to several incorrect assumptions about the technology and how it’s used. It’s something that happens with any new technology. As the technology gains attention and acceptance in the market, some misconceptions about it are also bound to spring up. Here are three of the biggest myths that surround SD-WAN … and the real story behind them: #1: Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) will be entirely replaced by public Internet transport connections The real story: The reasoning behind…
Industry Insights
NFV vs. SDN: What’s the Difference?
By Versa Staff
Versa Networks
September 27, 2016
Telecommunications companies have taken a strong interest in SDN. At the same time, more enterprise use cases for NFV have been emerging. When it comes to software-defined networking (SDN) vs. network functions virtualization (NFV), both are related and both use network abstraction. However, SDN separates and abstracts the control plane into software from the data plane, which remains in hardware, and NFV is a combination of separating wholesale network and security functions into specific software, then service chaining them. NFV: Not Just for Telcos When network function virtualization (NFV) first started making headlines about four years ago, the initial use…
Industry Insights
The Promise of Software-Defined Wide Area Networking
By Versa Staff
Versa Networks
August 23, 2016
A recent IDG report predicted that the nascent software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) industry, worth a mere $225 million last year, will experience a 90 percent compound annual growth rate over the next five years to become a $6 billion industry by 2020. SNS Research revealed that by the end of 2020, service provider investments in network function virtualization (NFV), SD-WAN and software-defined networking (SDN) will total more than $18 Billion. The Growth Drivers Telcos are aggressively jumping on the NFV and SDN bandwagon, targeting deployments across a multitude of areas. SNS Research said that operators are driven by the…
Industry Insights
The Bigger Picture (of WAN and Branch Networks)
By Versa Staff
Versa Networks
November 7, 2015
If you’ve been reading IT trade publications lately, you may have seen a new networking sector called software-defined WAN (SD-WAN). SD-WAN provides several value propositions for the enterprise in the form of lower connectivity costs by adding broadband/Internet options to your MPLS WAN, improved application performance through “app-aware” routing, and reduced complexity and operational delays by centrally managing branch appliances with zero-touch provisioning. But it doesn’t take a hardened network manager (or IT purchasing department analyst) to conclude that while SD-WAN improves connectivity, key branch services like security and WAN optimization are not part of the solution. Hence branch architectures…
Subscribe to the Versa Blog
Recent Posts
What Enterprises Are Really Saying About AI Security
By Dan MaierMay 14, 2026
