As the physical boundaries of the enterprise continue to sprawl, driven by M&A activities, globalization, mobility and more, old hardware-heavy WANs are failing to keep up with end-user needs.
At the same time, as enterprise applications migrate out of private LANs into private, public and hybrid clouds, enterprise WAN initiatives have been forced to evolve alongside those changes, shifting from slow-to-deploy, expensive leased lines, MPLS, VPNs and the WAN optimization hardware often needed to make those solutions work to cloud services and software-defined infrastructures.