Windstream CMO Mike Flannery joins the podcast to discuss why enterprises didn't deploy SD-WAN as widely as the industry anticipated they would at the start of the pandemic. Flannery explains how concerns around cost and ease of use stalled SD-WAN deployments for remote workers, but the tide is turning as remote access tools improve and enterprises budget for a long-term distributed workforce.

"Organizations still had quite a bit of their overhead tied up in physical locations and networking services," explains Flannery. "Investment in a home-based SD-WAN would have been a materially additive cost at a time when business revenues were under pressure as a result of the pandemic."

In addition, Flannery shares insights on whether customers are on board with and fully comprehend SASE, the networking and security convergence trend recently coined by Gartner. He also explains which industries have been more bullish about readily adopting SASE and SD-WAN.

— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading