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Insights from TeleGeography’s WAN Manager Survey
MEF CTO Pascal Menezes sat down with Greg Bryan, Senior Manager of Enterprise Research at TeleGeography, for an insightful discussion on SD-WAN, its adoption, the evolving role of MPLS, the emergence of SASE, and how it all ties into the future of Network-as-a-Service (NaaS).
TeleGeography is a telecommunications data provider of independent analysis of the global telecom market. They build and maintain massive data sets that are used to monitor, forecast, and map the telecommunications industry, including infrastructure, pricing, cloud, WAN, data centers, IP + transport networks, and retail insights.
Greg leads research focused on the enterprise (non-telecom) community, especially network managers at large multinational companies. He also runs the WAN Manager Survey, which gathers insights from around 65–75 WAN managers annually to understand enterprise network transformation trends and challenges, offering a demand-side perspective that complements TeleGeography’s traditionally supply-side research.
Let’s dive into this conversation, with highlights and key data from Greg’s WAN Manager Survey:
Pascal Menezes: SD-WAN has been a hot topic for years. Has it become the norm in enterprise networks?
Greg Bryan: Yes, it has. While it took a bit longer than we initially expected—thanks in part to the pandemic—SD-WAN adoption has surged. According to our WAN Manager Survey, back in 2018, just 21% of enterprises had deployed it. By Q4 2023, that number had jumped to 63%, with another 20% in the rollout phase. That puts total adoption near 75%. And we’re now seeing some enterprises move on to their second or even third SD-WAN deployment as they refine their vendor choices.
Pascal Menezes: Who’s adopting SD-WAN—multinationals, mid-sized enterprises, or both?
Greg Bryan: Our data mostly reflects larger multinationals, but SD-WAN has definitely trickled down to mid-sized and even smaller enterprises. We’ve seen deployments in companies with just a dozen sites. There’s also a long tail of SD-WAN providers catering specifically to small and mid-market businesses. So yes, it’s a cross-market trend at this point.
Pascal Menezes: Are enterprises doing SD-WAN as a DIY project, or are they leaning on managed services?
Greg Bryan: It’s a mixed bag, but the most common approach is co-managed. Enterprises want control but also recognize they don’t have the massive teams needed for fully DIY setups. Some companies have hundreds of sites with just a handful of engineers. So co-managed services strike the right balance. We’ve also seen enterprises shift to sourcing underlay services from multiple regional providers, which sometimes leads them to work directly with SD-WAN vendors or MSPs for the overlay.
Pascal Menezes: Is SD-WAN replacing MPLS entirely?
Greg Bryan: MPLS usage is absolutely declining, but it’s not disappearing overnight. In 2018, MPLS was used at 82% of sites in our survey. By 2023, that dropped to 41%. Many enterprises are moving toward all-internet underlays—especially with SD-WAN enabling local breakouts and better application performance. But there are still places where MPLS sticks around, like China or in compliance-heavy industries, or where enterprises still have significant on-prem data centers. MPLS is declining, but it’ll linger for specific use cases.
Pascal Menezes: SD-WAN seems to be gaining momentum because of SASE. How does SASE fit into all this?
Greg Bryan: Back in 2019, we started collecting data on the rollout and installation of Zero Trust. The Zero Trust concept became the SASE framework. In 2019, only 8% of enterprises in our survey had implemented Zero Trust, but by late 2023, 43% had rolled out SASE. SASE uptake has been faster than SD-WAN. It solves a key problem: as enterprises shift to cloud and local internet breakouts, they lose the traditional security perimeter. SASE brings together SD-WAN and security in a cloud-native way, with security functions like Zero Trust Network Access and Secure Web Gateway running at the edge. It’s become a critical part of the new enterprise WAN.
SD-WAN is now being “pulled” along by SASE adoption. It enables enterprises to build secure, private overlays across internet underlays and tie directly into cloud-delivered security platforms. It’s no longer just about smarter routing—now it’s about enabling secure, cloud-first networking.
Pascal Menezes: How does all this lead into Network-as-a-Service (NaaS)? What are the biggest obstacles for enterprises embracing NaaS?
Greg Bryan: NaaS is a fascinating space. We’re hearing a lot from the carriers that NaaS is exciting, and the technology is there to make it a reality. The enterprises are a little bit lagging on this. Enterprises can get on-demand, automated network services—including underlay, overlay, security, and multi-cloud connectivity. But adoption is still early. The biggest barriers today are awareness, use-case clarity, and financial models. Enterprises are used to fixed budgets, and variable billing can be hard to navigate. That said, interest is growing fast, and the potential is huge.
I definitely think that NaaS has a lot of promise. We need the enterprises to be more proactive than reactive when it comes to networking. They have been doing networking a long time, purely reactive, and they need to move into a different role now where the network might be driving some of the things that we do in IT now rather than just responding to it. NaaS has a big role to play here, and I’m excited to see how it develops over the next few years.
Learn More
- Read the MEF NaaS Industry Blueprint.
- Also read MEF’s State of the Industry Report: SASE.
- And see the MEF NaaS Customer Experience White Paper.
- More about MEF’s Underlay Connectivity Services and Overlay Connectivity Services with SD-WAN.
- Listen in on Pascal and Greg’s conversation in the Executives at the Edge podcast episode, SD-WAN vs MPLS: Battling for Network Dominance.
- Download the Executive Summary of TeleGeography’s latest WAN Manager Survey
- Explore the data and analysis in TeleGeography’s Cloud and WAN Research Service
- Meet Greg at MEF’s next Global NaaS Event
Amy Foschetti
PR Executive | MEF