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State of the WAN 2017

Gary Sevounts

Global enterprise WAN traffic is growing about 200% annually, according to the 2017 State of the WAN Report from Aryaka.

“Understanding the state of the WAN – and the impacts that global network traffic has on business strategy – gives IT leaders the ability to partner with their C-suite to enhance business execution,” said Shawn Farshchi, Aryaka’s President and CEO. “With nearly 50% of all global enterprise traffic now comprising cloud and SaaS, and legacy technologies, like MPLS, failing to address this trend, the ability to address the needs of the business translates into better business execution and competitive advantage.”


Other key insights from the study include:
.
■ Among all regions, Asia-Pacific saw the biggest spike in WAN traffic (248%) in 2016, suggesting that companies in this region are rapidly adopting cloud technology and transforming their businesses to compete in a digital world. In addition, the use of 100 Mbps links in China rose dramatically in 2016, from 6% of links the previous year to 25% of links this year. This shows the power and growth of the Chinese economy overall as it closes the gap with Western countries in terms of demand for high-speed connectivity.

■ By industry, the Manufacturing vertical saw a massive 440% increase in WAN traffic last year. Other verticals at the cutting edge of innovation include the Software and Internet sector, which grew network traffic by 526%, as well as the Real Estate, Energy and Utilities, and Travel industries, whose WAN traffic grew by around 200%.

■ HTTP and HTTPS together now make up close to 50% of all WAN traffic. Previously, the majority of WAN traffic was of the client-server variety, with traffic moving to and from the data center. But the increased adoption of cloud services has greatly driven up the amount of Internet traffic within the enterprise.

■ Internet bandwidths and quality are increasing at the WAN edge and over short distances. However, the hand-off between ISPs over the Internet or IP-VPN is getting worse, affecting the performance of business-critical applications, such as ERP or hosted voice and video. For data and applications being transferred over long distances, the middle mile remains unreliable and is riddled with latency, packet loss, and jitter – suggesting that the Internet is not the new enterprise network, as others have suggested.

About the Report: Aryaka aggregated and analyzed enterprise WAN traffic over the past four years to identify trends and challenges in application performance, WAN reliability, and bandwidth access between specific geographies and in different industries. With data aggregated from over 5000 sites in 63 countries, this report gives a detailed look into the current state of WAN infrastructure and its impact on global business.

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State of the WAN 2017

Gary Sevounts

Global enterprise WAN traffic is growing about 200% annually, according to the 2017 State of the WAN Report from Aryaka.

“Understanding the state of the WAN – and the impacts that global network traffic has on business strategy – gives IT leaders the ability to partner with their C-suite to enhance business execution,” said Shawn Farshchi, Aryaka’s President and CEO. “With nearly 50% of all global enterprise traffic now comprising cloud and SaaS, and legacy technologies, like MPLS, failing to address this trend, the ability to address the needs of the business translates into better business execution and competitive advantage.”


Other key insights from the study include:
.
■ Among all regions, Asia-Pacific saw the biggest spike in WAN traffic (248%) in 2016, suggesting that companies in this region are rapidly adopting cloud technology and transforming their businesses to compete in a digital world. In addition, the use of 100 Mbps links in China rose dramatically in 2016, from 6% of links the previous year to 25% of links this year. This shows the power and growth of the Chinese economy overall as it closes the gap with Western countries in terms of demand for high-speed connectivity.

■ By industry, the Manufacturing vertical saw a massive 440% increase in WAN traffic last year. Other verticals at the cutting edge of innovation include the Software and Internet sector, which grew network traffic by 526%, as well as the Real Estate, Energy and Utilities, and Travel industries, whose WAN traffic grew by around 200%.

■ HTTP and HTTPS together now make up close to 50% of all WAN traffic. Previously, the majority of WAN traffic was of the client-server variety, with traffic moving to and from the data center. But the increased adoption of cloud services has greatly driven up the amount of Internet traffic within the enterprise.

■ Internet bandwidths and quality are increasing at the WAN edge and over short distances. However, the hand-off between ISPs over the Internet or IP-VPN is getting worse, affecting the performance of business-critical applications, such as ERP or hosted voice and video. For data and applications being transferred over long distances, the middle mile remains unreliable and is riddled with latency, packet loss, and jitter – suggesting that the Internet is not the new enterprise network, as others have suggested.

About the Report: Aryaka aggregated and analyzed enterprise WAN traffic over the past four years to identify trends and challenges in application performance, WAN reliability, and bandwidth access between specific geographies and in different industries. With data aggregated from over 5000 sites in 63 countries, this report gives a detailed look into the current state of WAN infrastructure and its impact on global business.

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

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Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...