Enterprises Are Running Cloud-Based Apps Nearly 50% Of The Time

• 46.3% of all enterprise WAN traffic is cloud-based, split between HTTPS (27.8%) and HTTP (18.5%).
• Popular cloud apps including Microsoft Office365 continue to see rapid adoption across enterprises globally, as indicated by on-premises mail SMTP declining.
• 100 Mbps links are on the rise, jumping from 7% of the global average to 25%.
• The rapid growth of HTTP and HTTPs are leading indicators of continued data center consolidation.

These and other findings from Aryaka’s State of the WAN Report, 2017 released this week quantify how quickly cloud adoption is accelerating in the enterprise. A copy of the report can be downloaded here (37 pp., PDF, free, opt-in).  Aryaka based the study on aggregated data from its customer base, analyzing Wide Area Network (WAN) traffic and integration data from over 5,000 locations distributed across 63 countries including 500 enterprises. The aggregated data provides insights into enterprise WAN adoption globally. Please see page 35 of the study for additional details regarding the methodology.

Key takeaways include the following:

• Software & Internet-based enterprises, Manufacturing and Finance had the greatest increase in WAN traffic between 2015 and 2016. The rapid growth of WAN traffic in manufacturing is attributed to more enterprise-level applications including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), Quality, Supply Chain Management (SCM), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications being cloud-based.

• 46.3% of all enterprise WAN traffic is cloud-based, split between HTTPS (27.8%) and HTTP (18.5%). Cloud-based WAN traffic is growing the fastest of any category the study captured, HTTP showing the largest growth of any category. In previous years’ studies, client/server-based protocols dominated the results of WAN traffic analysis. This year’s results shows declines in TCP-based applications such as FTP, MS Remote Desktop, SMTP, and MSSQL further underscoring the growing dominance of Cloud- and SaaS-based WAN traffic

• Financial Services firms have the highest demand for very high-speed WANs by a wide margin. 63% of Financial Services firms are using WAN links with a bandwidth above 40 More than 75% of the links in the Healthcare, Software and Internet, Manufacturing, and Business Services sectors rely on high-speed or very-high-speed WAN links, indicating an almost ubiquitous trend and the increase in bandwidth demands across verticals.

• Americas-based WANs have the lowest variation in response times globally with the majority of the links having a response time in the 8 – 20% range. The study found the lowest quality link was San Jose – Shanghai, with a very high response time variation of 150% and average response time as high as three seconds, with a maximum response time of around 40 seconds. The Delhi – Chicago link has pretty low variation, with a response time of about 11%, but the average response time is about 900 ms, which is very high and will certainly affect the end user experience.