A fierce competitive battle is raging at the Wide Area Network (WAN) edge, and this battle is far from over. The battleground is Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN), and the combatants are many. By applying application and network-aware algorithms to routing WAN traffic across multiple transport links, enterprises can more economically satisfy their growing appetite for bandwidth; while maintaining, and possibly improving, application performance and end-users’ experiences.

As Stratecast absorbed the waves of new product and feature announcements at AWS re:Invent last month, the AWS Outposts pre-launch announcement piqued our interest from two angles. The first is the AWS-promoted use case of hybrid cloud where Outposts is a remote and customer-dedicated extension of the AWS cloud platform. The second, and the topic of this insight, is Stratecast’s view that Outposts could be a highly viable edge platform for SD-WAN. In this insight we outline our justification for this viewpoint. First, a snapshot of enterprise SD-WAN adoption is presented.