The growing shift of applications to the cloud means that more network traffic is moving over the Internet rather than over the predictably stable MPLS WAN. At the same time, costs of traditional WAN architectures are pushing more enterprises to adopt direct Internet access, either exclusively or as part of a hybrid design. MPLS may not go away overnight, particularly for legacy and latency-sensitive applications, but the traditional WAN will only get smaller as the Internet takes on a higher proportion of enterprise traffic.
As enterprise make the move, network teams and budget decision makers often see software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) technology as a magic wand that makes availability, performance, and other issues of moving to direct Internet access go away.
