David Trossell, CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks speaks to Digitalisation World about how distributed cloud networking can accelerate data protection and security measures with new technologies.
July 10, 2026
Vendors often change product branding and descriptions to appear innovative, by creating the latest thing that everyone should buy. Could the same be done with Distributed Cloud Networking (DCN)? Possibly. But there is no single date of its invention.
It emerged as an umbrella term in the mid-2020s to describe the convergence of previously separate domains, such as WAN-as-a-Service, multi-cloud networking and SASE into a unified, cloud-delivered fabric that many commentators are saying is designed for fulfilling AI-era application demands.
In conversation with Fierce Networks, Dell’Oro Group Senior Director, Mauricio Sanchez, comments: “DCN is useful as an umbrella because it captures the convergence happening, as enterprises modernise the WAN into a distributed, cloud-delivered fabric that has to deliver connectivity, security, visibility and performance end-to-end across users, sites and cloud workloads,” he said. “The term is less about inventing a new category and more about reflecting that buyers are increasingly making decisions across previously separate domains.”
What is distributed cloud networking?
In her January 2026 article, ‘What is distributed cloud networking?’, Diana Goovaerts adds that “The DCN umbrella spans the Cloud/Application Edge, WAN Middle Mile and User/WAN Edge categories.” The ‘Middle Mile’ is about the high-speed switching and transport that carries aggregated traffic from the last mile across large geographic regions.
According to a Google AI summary, on Youtube, Cisco and Cato Networks, relying on the standard public internet often led to “unpredictable traffic, packet loss and high latency.” To counter this, modern WAN strategies – particularly using SD-WANs – aim to optimise the middle mile by taking control of this transit. “Instead of routing traffic haphazardly across the public internet, enterprises leverage middle-mile optimisation,” it explains.
The new WAN?
Sean Michael Kerner, a contributing writer for Network world, authored an article that suggested DCN [is] becoming the new WAN for AI-era applications. His article, which was published at the beginning of 2026 too, claims that enterprises are abandoning fragmented WAN architectures. That may be the case, but the notion of something being distributed doesn’t really imply consolidation.
So, what does this really mean? In a DCN, or in a hierarchical network, distribution layers perform packet routing and aggregation without breaking or altering payload. On the other hand, network fragmentation talks about the intentional splitting of data packets at the network layer to fit a smaller Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU).
“When a source sends data to a destination, it may traverse multiple networks (or hops). Each of these networks may have different MTU values. If the data packet is larger than the MTU of any hop, it must be broken into smaller pieces — that’s fragmentation,” writes Ankur Paul in his article for Medium, ‘Fragmentation in Network Communication.’
Standardising connectivity, security policy and telemetry
Sanchez comments that: “”DCN is increasingly treated as an end-to-end operating model that standardises connectivity, security policy enforcement and telemetry across users, the middle mile and cloud/application edges.” Kerner comments that the “DCN category is gaining relevance as hybrid architectures and AI-era traffic patterns increase the operational penalty for fragmented control planes.” Dell’Oro’s research adds that buyers are subsequently moving away from isolated upgrades. The research company finds that there is a new need to prioritise architectures that reduce operational seams across, writes Kerner. “connectivity, security and telemetry so that incident response and change control can follow a single thread.”
Moreover, Sanchez claims that, with cloud-application edge demand accelerating because multi-cloud, can’t be a durable driver by itself. This is since “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.”
In essence, buyers are wishing to simplify policy placement and accelerate troubleshooting. There is a wish to reduce handoffs between networking and security teams, too. A ‘new WAN’ is therefore arguably required to meet these demands and the challenges presented by the data growth of artificial intelligence (AI), such as changes in traffic patterns and new operational expectations.
AI: increasing bandwidth demand
AI applications are also increasing bandwidth demand, and they are often impacted by latency and pack loss. According to Sanchez, they amplify East-West and inter-region traffic, making fragmented control planes and stitched operations more costly. He also believes that AI is raising the bar for Day Two operations, and this is leading to a demand for faster incident response, for a tighter policy-to-telemetry linkage and more automation. This is to keep up with rapid application change. Subsequently, he argues this is why DCN is the new WAN for AI-era applications.
Whether this is the case or not, it’s performance can be improved with WAN Acceleration to mitigate latency and packet loss. WAN Acceleration with Bridgeworks PORTRockIT, for example, uses AI, machine learning and data parallelisation to mitigate the effects of latency and packet loss when large volumes of data are sent across a WAN.
There is no need to buy a new pipe. Doing so won’t necessarily improve performance or boost bandwidth utilisation. Yet, WAN Acceleration can boost its usage by up to 98%. So, while DCN is often presented as a way to make application paths more predictable across hybrid environments, it does not remove the underlying physics of wide-area transport. Latency and packet loss still affect performance when data moves between regions, clouds and edge locations, particularly for large transfers, replication, backup and other bandwidth-intensive workloads.
Complementary technology
In that context, WAN Acceleration is a complementary technology rather than a replacement for existing network architectures. Unlike WAN Optimisation, it can handle encrypted data, and even SD-WANs benefit from a WAN Acceleration overlay by boosting their performance. When data travels across long distances, latency and packet loss increase – adversely impacting distributed clouds and transport of large volumes of data over WANs. Thankfully, this can be addressed and even improve the ability of distributed cloud architectures to transport data while maintaining security and resilience.
Distributed cloud networking may be a useful shorthand for converging WAN, security and cloud services, but it is not a magic category. Renaming familiar technologies does not eliminate the hard realities of networking. However, the market describes it and latency, packet loss and operational complexity still determine whether these architectures actually deliver results.
For enterprises, that is the clearest case for pairing DCN with WAN Acceleration: without improving transport efficiency across distance, the architectural benefits of distribution can be undermined by the network itself. It’s therefore crucial to look beyond any industry hype to ensure that data can be sent and received rapidly, in a timely manner, and securely without falling foul of WAN latency and packet loss.