DCN becoming the new WAN for AI-era applications

The tried and true enterprise WAN market is undergoing a shift and consolidating around a new architecture class. AI workloads and hybrid cloud deployments are exposing the operational costs of managing separate control planes for connectivity, security, and application delivery.

Distributed cloud networking (DCN) addresses this by unifying policy enforcement and telemetry across the entire application path. The architecture spans user edge, WAN middle mile, and cloud/application edge with a single control plane instead of stitched-together point solutions.

Dell’Oro Group now projects the DCN market will reach $21 billion by 2029, growing at a 30% compound annual growth rate. The forecast represents a significant upward revision from the firm’s January 2025 projection of $17 billion by 2028. The acceleration reflects enterprises moving beyond isolated network upgrades to comprehensive architectural shifts.

“The biggest shift has been the market’s center of gravity moving from multi-cloud connectivity as the headline problem to ‘operational coherence’ as the deciding factor,” Mauricio Sanchez, senior director of enterprise security and networking at Dell’Oro Group, told Network World.

The rapid evolution of the DCN market

The market’s understanding of DCN has evolved significantly over the past year.

Sanchez noted that in Dell’Oro’s January 2025 forecast, the story emphasized hybrid cloud adoption and AI-driven demand for elastic, software-defined networking, with multi-cloud complexity as a primary growth engine. For the new January 2026 forecast, the framing is clearer.

“DCN is increasingly treated as an end-to-end operating model that standardizes connectivity, security policy enforcement, and telemetry across users, the middle mile, and cloud/application edges,” Sanchez said.

Dell’Oro defines DCN as platforms and services that deliver consistent connectivity, policy enforcement, and telemetry from users, across the WAN, to distributed cloud and application edges spanning branch sites, data centers and public clouds. The category is gaining relevance as hybrid architectures and AI-era traffic patterns increase the operational penalty for fragmented control planes.

DCN buyers are moving beyond isolated upgrades and are prioritizing architectures that reduce operational seams across connectivity, security and telemetry so that incident response and change control can follow a single thread, according to Dell’Oro’s research.

What makes DCN distinct is that it links user-to-application experience with where policy and visibility are enforced. This matters as application delivery paths become more dynamic and workloads shift between on-premises data centers, public cloud, and edge locations. The architectural requirement is eliminating handoffs between networking and security teams rather than optimizing individual network segments.

Where DCN is growing the fastest

Cloud/application edge is the fastest-growing DCN pillar. This segment deploys policy enforcement and telemetry collection points adjacent to workloads rather than backhauling traffic to centralized security stacks.

“Multi-cloud remains a reality, but it is no longer the durable driver by itself,” Sanchez said. “Cloud/application edge is accelerating because enterprises are trying to make application paths predictable and secure across hybrid environments, and that requires pushing application-aware steering, policy enforcement, and unified telemetry closer to workloads.”

The shift reflects changing buyer priorities. Sanchez noted that as architectures become more distributed and dynamic, buyers value platforms that simplify policy placement and accelerate troubleshooting. That type of approach also serves to reduce handoffs between networking and security teams.

“In practice, this is where WAN decisions start to be influenced by application-adjacent controls and the need to operate the full path, not just connect endpoints,” he said.

AI changes traffic and operational requirements

Just like everything else in networking and the broader IT landscape, AI is having a significant impact.

According to Sanchez, AI workloads are reshaping network demands in two dimensions. AI is changing traffic patterns, and it is changing operational expectations.

“AI-era applications increase bandwidth demand, raise sensitivity to latency and jitter, and amplify east-west and inter-region traffic, which makes fragmented control planes and stitched operations more costly,” Sanchez explained.

At the same time, he noted that AI is raising the bar for day-two operations as well. This is where enterprises need faster incident response, tighter policy-to-telemetry linkage, and more automation to keep pace with rapid application change.

“Over time, this is why DCN becomes the new WAN for AI-era applications. It aligns connectivity, security, and visibility as a coordinated system so enterprises can operate distributed applications reliably at scale,” Sanchez said.