Businesses are looking to upgrade their traditional wide area network (WAN) solution as they struggle to manage applications like unified communications, video conferencing and branch-office expansion, according to research by analyst company TRAC Research.
The study of 402 end-user organisations found 42% were planning to move away from physical hardware deployments to a virtual appliance, while 37% said they would move to cloud services.
When asked why they were replacing their WAN optimisation solution, 56% of end-users cited a failure to cope with increasing amounts of applications and usage, 49% said a lack of visibility into the performance of applications and 45% said the solution was unable to deploy new applications.
Bojan Simic, president and analyst at TRAC research, said: "The top challenge for managing network traffic according to our study is controlling new usages like unified communications or video, internet traffic, VDI and BYOD.
"Moving beyond WAN optimisation to achieve dynamic application performance guarantee is a critical step for IT departments seeking to transition from a technical cost centre to the role of advisers that can work with business stakeholders to ensure their users are as productive as possible."
