The Top 5 Networking Trends for 2019

We are seeing typical corporate demands for bandwidth increasing by over 50% each year, the amount of capacity deployed on international internet, public and switched voice networks doubling at the same time as international bandwidth prices continuing to fall.  Bandwidth demands, alongside business demands of the digital workplace (cloud, flexible working, unified communications and collaboration) is creating a huge requirement for new technologies to be implemented. New technologies are enabling new possibilities, which then fuels demand even further.

Wavestone’s Smart Networks Subject Matter Experts encounter new technologies on a regular basis, so when it comes to understanding which to take note of and which is the next fad, they know what they are talking about!

Our Smart Network experts have collated the Top Five Trends in the networking space, that will be big in 2019.

1. Deployment of The Next Generation Networks – SD WAN

There is a major trend in the move towards utilising the newer SD-WAN technologies in order to deliver a more flexible network infrastructure, including universal CPE and supporting VNFs. The application centric approach of SD-WAN enables organisations to leverage a hybrid approach to network transport to deliver efficiencies utilising not only traditional MPLS but also various flavours of internet and 4G/LTE connectivity.

We see many organisations moving from small scale proofs of concept into full sourcing programmes and we expect to see many significant deployments during 2019 as the market matures.

2. Decentralisation

Traditional architectures focused all traffic onto the data centre with security and internet access centralised. The increased cloud usage and greater collaboration with partners and suppliers have challenged this model.

The rise of cloud-based security services and direct cloud interconnection is leading to many organisations adopting a less centralised approach in order to optimise their connectivity to the cloud platforms.

3. Increasingly sophisticated supplier ecosystem

Large organisations are moving away from the single supplier approach for their networking needs and are seeking to utilise more best of breed suppliers.  This is leading to more sophisticated models with the concept of the SIAM (Service Integration and Management) layer to integrate the services – either provided in-house, or through an IT integrator or through a lead-telecoms / network provider.

In addition to this, the use of regional or single technology providers is increasingly commonplace (e.g. internet), in order to optimise price and performance.

4. Wireless First

Improved wireless technology and associated management and security has led many organisation to pursue a wireless-first policy.  This removes the cost associated with moves adds and changes to fixed wired LAN infrastructure and increased resilience and reliability.

Cloud based “as a service” deployments and sophisticated monitoring capabilities and tools are also being deployed to give greater visibility and performance insight.  We will start to see WIFI 6 (802.11.ax) based solutions designed for 4x the user throughput of current solutions.

5. 5G

2019 will see the emergence of public 5G mobile services.  This offers the potential for significant throughput increase (up to 10x) as well as the opportunity for different service models from the suppliers.  We expect many large scale users to be investigating the potential of 5G to replace or augment fixed network connections as well as supporting new capabilities such as large scale IoT deployments. We see these leading to significant deployments in 2020.

It’s clear that technology and communications are rapidly advancing. It’s vitally important for organisations to carefully consider which of these new technologies are right for their business and how these are implemented throughout the organisation in order to get the most from these technologies.