Aryaka selected in the 2022 Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’ for North America, EMEA, and ASIA/Pacific

For the 3rd year in a row, Gartner recognized Aryaka as a ‘Voice of the Customer’ in the latest Peer Insights Review for WAN Edge Infrastructure. The review summarizes and scores vendors based on customer feedback with the intent to provide insights for IT decision makers.

According to Gartner, “This aggregated peer perspective, along with the individual detailed reviews, is complementary to Gartner expert research and can play a key role in your buying process, as it focuses on direct peer experiences of implementing and operating a solution.^”1

Vendors in the Peer Insights Review must meet a minimum set of requirements to even make the final document. Those meeting the threshold are grouped into four quadrants with the top, right quadrant receiving the Gartner designation of Customers’ Choice.

“The acknowledgment from our customers is the greatest compliment that we could receive,” said Matt Carter, CEO. “One of our core principals is to always put the customer first and this Gartner recognition is further evidence that our strategy is working.”

“One stop-shop for bringing all your locations under one SD-WAN umbrella.”

A Changing Landscape

The review hits at a moment of tremendous change for the traditional enterprise WAN. As workloads move to the cloud and employees define a new normal for what the workplace looks like, network and security decision makers are facing unprecedented change.

According to Gartner, “The market for branch office wide-area network functionality is shifting from dedicated routing, security, and WAN optimization appliances to feature-rich software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) and virtual customer premises equipment (vCPE) platforms. WAN edge infrastructure now incorporates a widening set of network functions, including secure routers, firewalls, SD- WAN, WAN path control and WAN optimization, along with traditional routing functionality.”

One and Only One

Aryaka was the only managed services provider receiving the designation of ‘Customer Choice.’ Additionally, it was the only provider that was selected in all three regions of the world, North America, EMEA and APAC.

“Being recognized by both Gartner and our customers is an incredible honor,” said Dennis Monner, Chief Commercial Officer at Aryaka. “What makes it even more special is that we are the only managed services company represented and we were selected in the top-right quadrant for all three regions.”

The review includes both a quantitative scoring of the vendor-based questions like likelihood to recommend and also customer testimonials on the experience. Both the scoring and the testimonials can be found at Gartner here.

Read Gartner’s 2022 roadmap for SASE convergence that dives into our new reality –

“Work from anywhere and the relentless shift to cloud computing services have accelerated SASE offerings to enable anywhere, anytime access from any device. Security and risk management leaders should build a migration plan, from legacy perimeter and hardware-centric offerings to a SASE architecture.”

“The adoption of zero trust security architectures and branch office transformation projects — including software-defined WAN (SD-WAN), Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) offload, internet-only branch — are accelerating the adoption of secure access service edge (SASE).”

Learn how you can adopt a Unified SASE architecture!

For more information on Aryaka’s SD-WAN and SASE services, check out these additional resources:

Additional Resources:

• Aryaka Managed SD-WAN as-a-Service
• Aryaka’s 6th annual State of the WAN
• Aryaka’s Cloud-First WAN for Dummies

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We’re honored to be recognized by Vertical Systems in their Carrier Managed SD-WAN Services Leaderboard, now for the fourth year in a row. As with previous years, we’re in the company of much larger legacy telcos as well as MSPs that don’t deliver a truly integrated services experience.

As Vertical Systems notes, “The U.S. Managed SD-WAN services market emerged from the pandemic in 2021 with solid growth in new site installations, driven by accelerated network transformations and more flexible solutions for customers,” said Rick Malone, principal of Vertical Systems Group. “Competition is heating up as evidenced by the shakeup in top provider rankings on our year-end 2021 U.S. LEADERBOARD benchmark.”

The announcing of the 2021 U.S. Carrier Managed SD-WAN Services Vertical Systems Group LEADERBOARD comes on the heels of 6th Annual State of the WAN Report. For this report, more than 1,600 enterprise companies were surveyed.

Findings and key trends included:

• A quarter of the respondents state they have closed 25-50% of their office sites, dovetailing into overall hybrid work initiatives where 75% state that at least a quarter of their employees will remain remote permanently post-pandemic.
• Accelerating digital transformation initiatives also impact legacy data centers, with 51% planning to eliminate their use within the next 24 months as they move to the cloud.
• The surveyed group says Microsoft Teams (58%) and Office 365 (55%) are among the most widely adopted SaaS applications, followed by Zoom and Google Docs (35%).
• A quarter of respondents expect budgets to grow by 25% or more in the next year, with a full three-quarters projecting at least a 10% growth. Investment appears to be accompanied via cost savings.

Aryaka’s product and services offerings, including our recently announced FlexCore architecture that enables a new L3 Enhanced Internet service in addition to our premium L2 offer, AppAssure for deep application insights and co-management, and managed SASE, places the company at an optimal position to take advantage of these observations.

As Vertical Systems notes, Aryaka is only one of two vendors that utilize internally developed technology and is the only one with a singular focus on SD-WAN and SASE. The other providers leverage technology from one and in most cases multiple technology vendors that include Cisco, Fortinet, Versa and VMware.
Advantages of an ‘all-in-one’ offer include tighter integration between the technology and the service offer, with one example the elimination of the traditional overlay-underlay split that impacts the support experience as well as new feature velocity.

We are glad to see this reflected as we are once again included in Vertical Systems’ Leaderboard for Managed SD-WAN Services.

Join us for a demo to see how Aryaka can help you transform your SD-WAN and deliver on a SASE solution truly tailored to your enterprise’s needs.

The post Aryaka has been ranked by Vertical Systems for the past 4 years. appeared first on Aryaka.

The average tenure of the enterprise CIO was 4.6 years¹ … before the pandemic. Many expect that it will be even shorter as we emerge from the global crisis.

And as the new regime of IT leaders are taking office, one thing is very apparent … they are different.  There are more MBAs.  More profiles with P&L experience.  They are more than just technologists … they are strategic business leaders with a charter to reshape the modern enterprise.

“The CIO role used to be defined as an operational position that would focus on efficiency and keeping the business running faster, cheaper, better, and safer,” says Martha Heller who leads a recruiting firm specializing in CIO leadership.  “Now, technology leadership isn’t about running the business; it’s about changing the business and finding new opportunity.”

Great ideas or great systems?

New opportunities don’t always arise from amazing ideas. Often, they evolve and iterate to become great ideas.   The reason that agile development frameworks took-off was because they were fast.  Not in the literal sense of people working at a quicker pace, but fast because they enabled rapid adaptation.  Flexibility.

This flexibility enables the quick discovery and resolution of problems that ultimately gets good products to market, and then turns good products into great ones.

Similarly, the new face of the CIO is an agile one.  Flexible. Dynamic. Entrepreneurs able to identify issues early and then deploy resources appropriately to resolve them.

How do you scale almost infinitely?  Address zero-day threats that change every day.  Turn-up new applications in minutes. Integrate acquisitions in weeks.

You stay agile.  Flexible.

Agile minds deploy flexible systems

But as we all know too well, it is incredibly difficult to drive the business into tomorrow when dealing with the never-ending, break-fix of yesterday.  This becomes the Achilles heel for the CIO charged with transforming the business.  His or her success is “all predicated on a company having an agile, modern architecture.”²

It is not surprising then that one of the first projects that top performing companies undertake is addressing the backbone of that flexibility:  the network and security architecture.³ It underlays how the company operates.  How it protects data or enables collaboration.  It determines the employee’s on-line experience … which is now his or her only experience.

The CIO who wants to be agile and flexible needs the platform that already is agile and flexible. How long does that take?  It depends. Working with a provider like Aryaka, changes could be in place in a matter of weeks. For those looking to build themselves, it’s likely around 4.6 years.

Check out how Aryaka helped some enterprises:
https://www.aryaka.com/about-us/proven-success/
https://www.aryaka.com/videos/specialty-chemicals-company-albemarle-on-the-benefits-of-aryaka/

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The test for ‘digital transformation’ used to be measured by how many applications ran in the cloud.  The graph that IT leaders liked to show in the quarterly operations review was the one where the percentage of applications running in AWS continued moving up and to the right.

The challenge that we are seeing today, magnified as half the workforce moved from the office to the house, is when the network that delivers those services competes on the same internet with Disney, streaming the Book of Boba Fett to their 100M subscribers.  It’s not even really a competition, your customers and employees just lose (and let’s be fair, losing to The Mandalorian was palatable … but Boba Fett?!)

Great houses need great foundations

When you build a great house, you don’t start by decorating your favorite room.  Truly progressive CIOs understand that the first step to building is a solid foundation.

While the cloud can deliver all the amazing benefits as advertised in the brochure — flexibility, agility, speed, performance — it is only captured when delivered on a network that supports it.

Moving applications and workloads to cloud environments like Azure and AWS without a cloud-optimized network and security architecture puts stress on the network and security tools protecting it.  The old network was simply not built for the weight now being placed upon it from remote users operating in the cloud.  As a result, it cracks.

Change agents make foundational changes.

CIOs understand that to change is to survive.  But transformative IT leaders know that foundational change starts, unironically, at the foundation.  As such, they are evolving the underpinning for their service — the network and security architecture — to the cloud.  And the numbers here tell a story.

They are closing data centers and ditching old-school MPLS links for SD-WAN and internet. They are pushing security to the edge and becoming more SASE (hoping desperately that Gartner changes the acronym at some point in the future).

They are driving their teams to align with network and security partners that provide cloud-like pricing, not massive capital expenditure that locks the business in for years.  They are opting for self-service delivered as-a-service, not an unanswered ticket from a carrier support team who could not care less.

Go slow to go fast

As the old saying goes, sometimes you need to go slow to go fast.  Transforming years, in some cases decades, of network and security plumbing takes time and the right team behind you.  But make no mistake, while it may not feel like it at the time, these CIOs are at the bleeding edge of change, putting their organizations on a foundation of unlimited potential.

So to get a feel for just how progressive the IT organization is, don’t ask about ‘digital transformation initiatives’ or what innovative R&D projects they have in the works.  Just ask about the current and future state of the network security architecture.

The post Great Houses Need Great Foundations (3 min read) appeared first on Aryaka.

And then the new CIO, hired after months of interviewing candidates with just the right background, just the right energy, and just the right amount of ‘shake-things-upness,’ said on the technology all-hands:

While the procurement team cheered, the remaining tech talent opened LinkedIn and began updating their profiles.

The cloud is the new center of data

It seems laughable to the generation of technology leaders who started their careers and ‘grew-up’ in the cloud to even consider building out in the hub-and-spoke, data center model of yesteryear. As our SVP of Product likes to say, “Data centers are for boomers.”

The new center of data is the cloud.

When a development leader or operations manager can spin-up production-ready AWS or Azure environments in minutes, why the heck would they even think about a data center?

Unfortunately, not every CIO is able to start from scratch and go all-in on the cloud. He or she often inherits a legacy infrastructure that was built for a different decade. Cloud native is simply not yet a luxury afforded the enterprise CIO for a company that’s been around for 20 years. The key word here is ‘yet’.

While the phrase ‘digital transformation’ has become such a buzz-wordy expression, change is absolutely happening. And the CIOs that are changing the fastest and driving a different way for IT to lead the business are the ones that understand that the cloud is absolutely the future … for almost everything. The more parts of the business that run in the cloud and the quicker they can get there, the faster the CIO can become an agent of change for the business, not just an enabler of the technology.

Up next: The leading indicators of CIOs who are truly transforming the business.

The post Are you even built to disrupt? (2 min read) appeared first on Aryaka.

As the landscape around us changes, some portions of the survey also change to reflect the current reality, whereas other trends remain the same. It provides a more relevant output that is readily consumable and actionable.

So, what did I find interesting in this year’s survey?

1. Enterprises are betting on hybrid workplaces – No surprise here!

Although the end of the pandemic is uncertain, nobody is waiting for it to end either. We see enterprises decisively moving forward, whether it be on creating new office space with real estate investments, divestitures, consolidation etc., or even in issuing decrees allowing for some or all of their work force to be entirely remote “permanently”.

Others are making accommodations for employees to come back into the office based on county regulations, vaccination status etc.

No matter where they are in this process, enterprises are placing tremendous emphasis on making employees productive through investments in predictable connectivity and collaboration platforms. This has increased the investments in network (WAN) and in various aspects of the security stack, in addition to other infrastructure elements.

For those investing in infrastructure and real estate, they are making a conscious effort to not create duplicity and cost stacking. Dynamic bandwidth allocation between sites and users, as-a-service consumption models, and cloud-delivered centralization are all becoming the norm as organizations navigate change.

2. Technology investments are on the rise with a focus on digital transformation

Conservatism in investment is giving way to decisiveness in leveraging technology as a key differentiator. We’re seeing this manifest through an acceleration in spending. However, supply chain disruptions, chip shortages, etc. have caused new initiatives to slow down, impacting the pace of digital transformation. Anecdotally, the cost savings resulting from real estate and utility savings, travel reductions, etc., are being repurposed into the technology stack to drive transformative initiatives, while mostly keeping the overall budget net-neutral.

This savings appears to have had a positive impact on network and security budgets, with a quarter of the enterprises expecting them to increase by 25% or more, and with almost everyone projecting at least a 10% hike in investment in these areas. Beyond this we see investment (or consolidation) also happening with collaboration platforms, productivity suites and cross-company planning initiatives. With a hybrid workforce this shift is spot on, and we do see Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Office 365 having gained ground in the last year or so, while SaaS applications in general having been growing like weeds!

I believe this will further accelerate cloud-first technologies with an emphasis on SD-WAN adoption and perhaps set a foundation for adoption of SASE (in a graded manner). But more on that later.

3. Focus on Visibility, Observability and Management

In some ways, this was a bit of a surprise for me, but perhaps it shouldn’t be. The fact of the matter is that the pace of change is unprecedented. As we know this is resulting in tectonic architectural shifts like shifting on-premise deployments to the cloud, applications being modernized and becoming more cloud-native, security posture getting rearchitected, consumption models shifting to an as-a-service delivery mechanism and convergence of hitherto siloed technologies to be more unified.

What stood out is that the IT organizations want to have deep visibility during this period of change. Visibility, monitoring and management – which were all once considered afterthoughts – have really been pulled to the head of the cart. The observability trend is really the umbrella discussion to be had here.

4. The road to SASE is promising but there are genuine concerns

Since this topic is top of mind, it is worth mentioning that at least the promise of the SASE architecture is compelling. A number of enterprises believe the benefits could be tangible, including time and cost savings, increased agility etc. to name a few. However, many enterprises are pragmatic to realize this is not an overnight shift and requires careful planning and de-risking. The complexity of evolving core connectivity and security elements is real, and trusting a single vendor to do it is concerning to a few that have embraced a multi-vendor strategy. An affinity towards getting all this delivered as a managed SASE solution, with SLAs and as-a-service, is therefore not a big surprise. We’re seeing interest in that approach grow considerably.

How to use the State of the WAN report? 

This is a free resource. So, first download it here.

As it is a summation of inputs and insights, you may choose to treat this as yet another resource and incorporate it into your planning cycles. In other words, it will help you “Plan your WAN”! We view the WAN and security to be intertwined and you’ll therefore find a lot of useful information on both.

If you are an Aryaka customer (or Partner), you will see references to some of Aryaka’s offerings. While these do not go into great detail, they provide a simple mapping to areas where you could reach out to Aryaka for help in your own refresh cycles.

The recommendation checklist evolves and you may look at that as a sanity check.

Most Enterprises also have licenses to analyst research reports and access to engagements with them. This SOTW 2022 report can act as a companion to such efforts.

The digital copy is available on January 20^th and the print edition will be available in a few weeks. If you’re interested in a physical copy, please let us know by checking the box when you download the report and we will do our best to get you a copy based on supply and availability.

You may also use it as a coffee table book at your home office or at your “office office” and enjoy the beautiful illustrations

Finally, this blog is incomplete without a big THANK YOU to our stellar marketing team that helps conduct surveys, produce and promote this report. They’re all heroes in my eyes!

The post Announcing the 6th annual edition of the Aryaka Global State of the WAN<br><span>Inputs from 1600 Enterprise decision makers globally</span> appeared first on Aryaka.

How Telcos are poorly placed to provide managed services for next generation Enterprise WAN solutions and how a Cloud-first WAN solution combined with a service-first delivery model is needed to provide much needed co-managed secure WAN services to enterprises.

I recently moved to new place and ordered an Internet connection from AT&T. AT&T shipped me a VDSL modem with WiFi, and even though I had a modem that they supported, they insisted that they must ship their own (and charge me every month for it!). Once service was turned ON, it was clear that I had to turn ON parental control for my young kids (With kids unlimited access to the internet is a bigger nightmare than unlimited access to candies!!). But to my bewilderment, AT&T does not support parental control on the WiFi modem that they sent me. The more frustrating part is that I knew the technology vendor who developed the WiFi modem, and it has supported parental controls on the same platform for few years. But AT&T still has not adopted it!

It is for such reasons the telcos remain the least innovative and most hated by consumers. In a 2018 American Customer Satisfaction Index report, out of 5 most hated industries, three were –  Cable Providers, Internet Service Providers and Wireless Phone Service Providers – all dominated by incumbent telcos!

There has been no dearth of innovation from technology vendors supplying the telcos, but chances are that their innovations have never seen the light of the day because the telco never pushed them to the end customers. As it is, end users are bad consumers of the features when left to individually discover, enable, and use them. And on top of that, if you have gatekeepers like telcos, who decide which features even get enabled, you have innovation coming out at a snail’s space.

Telco’s Inherent Deficiencies

The telco experience is not unique to consumers. It is same for SMBs and enterprises as well. The problem is amplified when offering enterprise WAN solutions. Telcos are besieged with poor customer experiences, inflexible solutions, and remain behind the curve in meeting the pandemic-driven fast paced changes in enterprise WAN requirements. Telcos have structural shortcomings in developing secure WAN solutions or delivering them in the post-pandemic world.

1. Stitched Up WAN solution: Telcos have stitched up solutions with technology and tools from multiple vendors. Customer onboarding and ongoing support workflows are loosely layered upon the solution as an afterthought instead of integrated into the solution. This does not provide a coherent customer experience throughout the services lifecycle from pre-sales to deployment to ongoing support and introduces risks at every stage. Customer touch points largely determine the customer experience, and telcos are poorly equipped due to stitched-up solutions and unprepared staff.
2. Lack of Expertise: WAN technology has progressed from leased lines (DIA), to MPLS, to SD-WAN, and now to SASE. Telcos were best placed to provide DIA and MPLS solutions, in which the critical piece was to provide solid network connectivity. And technology vendors had a limited role in MPLS, in the form of providing the hardware. So, when those solutions were delivered and managed by telcos, it made sense. But for next-gen WAN solutions – SD-WAN and SASE – robust network connectivity is a pre-requisite but not sufficient. As the SD-WAN acronym connotes, it is ‘software defined’ and software is developed by technology vendors, while telcos lack expertise in this area. WAN solutions are becoming more complex and feature-rich and telcos, which are typically volume players selling connectivity, lack the organizational sophistication to absorb this complexity. Many enterprises complain even during sales cycles, that it is difficult to communicate with telco sales teams as they lack the knowledge and understanding of enterprise WAN needs.  In next-gen WAN solutions, differentiation as well as the overall customer experience delivered by solutions is provided by the technology vendor, and telcos don’t have much of a contribution to this.
3. Lack of Flexibility: Telcos lack the agility and flexibility to deploy new features and respond to customer requirements and change requests. This is again due to stitched-up solutions and layered support workflows. Even when technology vendors innovate, telcos are slow to adapt. A part of the problem is, when technology vendors build new features, no doubt, they put the user at the center of the solution, but delivery and post-delivery support are often ignored, which makes it difficult for telcos to roll these out in a customer environment. The small proof is my parental control feature experience with AT&T’s Internet service. The path of innovation to user adoption, when controlled by telco, is fraught with obstacles.
4. Business Model with Perverse Incentive: Telco business models are built on a longer ROI period. Technology vendors have the incentive to innovate to keep themselves relevant, but telcos in fact have the exact opposite incentive – keep the service revenue coming with least new investment for as long as possible. For telcos, the MPLS cycle is still in mid-flight, it is a high revenue service, and they have the core-competency to deliver it. No wonder, a recent TeleGeography report states that, while SD-WAN services are gaining traction, enterprise spend is still dominated by MPLS and local access services. In fact, MPLS spend in 2020 was approximately $32.6 billion, almost 43% of the total WAN market compared to the SD-WAN connectivity spend of $1.6 billion or only 2.15% of the market.

Aryaka ‘Service-First’ Approach

At Aryaka, we are acutely aware of the challenges that enterprises are facing with telcos. With our unique position in the market as both a technology vendor and as well as a managed service provider, we are not only innovating in the technology space but also across the managed services delivery model. We follow a ‘service-first’ approach to solution development and delivery. Every new feature is developed with clear customer adaption target goal. As both a technology developer and managed service provider, our biggest advantage is a service delivery team at the table from Day-0 of feature conception, so feature delivery and post deployment support are not afterthought. Some of the advantages and outcomes of a service-first delivery model are:

1. Deployment and support tools are developed along with the feature. New features are not only designed with the user at the center but also delivery and support in mind. That ensures the feature sees the light of the day and gets widely activated or used in the customer’s network. Many times, new feature development to roll-out across all customers happens in weeks!
2. Aryaka has business model opposite of the telco – deliver more innovation to delight existing customers and attract new customers. The business model enables Aryaka to respond to enterprise customers and their fast-changing requirements in networking and security.
3. A second TeleGeography survey shows that 40% enterprises prefer a co-managed service model, which requires agile delivery and support. Aryaka has natively built co-management capabilities into its solution with appropriate co-management tools for customers and associated support workflows.

As much as Aryaka’s Cloud-First solution architecture is responsible for innovation at breakneck speed, our ‘Service-First’ solution delivery is responsible for bringing it to our customers in the fastest and best possible way. It certainly delights them, and no wonder we are voted as best in all regions in Gartner’s ‘Voice of the Customers’ for two straight years.

Breakthrough template

When you look back, another industry that the telco had tight grip on was mobile services. It is very clear, that Apple’s genius was not only with the revolutionary innovation of the iPhone but also in removing the destiny of phones from the clutches of the wireless service providers and reaching out to consumers directly. Prior to the iPhone, the service providers dictated which phones get certified on their networks and what features get enabled. Apple turned the table and the service providers had to evolve their network to support innovation coming from the iPhone and application ecosystem. If not for the changes happened with Apple’s iPhone, we would be still sending MMS (remember Multimedia Messaging Service!) over 3G networks on a phone with keys! The iPhone revolution has helped even the wireless service providers and according to latest American Customer Satisfaction report wireless phone service industry is no more in the top 5 hated industries.

Action in motion

This movie is paying out in other domains as well – Tesla cutting down the dealer network, or numerous SaaS companies delivering services directly to end users rather than waiting for some middlemen to test, certify and push it into the market. It is time, enterprises will do the same for their WAN service, unshackling themselves from the telcos so that their WAN solution responds well to dynamic networking and security needs in a post-pandemic world and allows them to take on whatever challenges that arise!

The post Breakthrough from the Telco Tyranny appeared first on Aryaka.

ISO 27001 provides a framework for companies to manage their data security and establishes requirements for information controls to manage people, processes, and technology. The standard covers both the technological aspects of security as well as corporate security, physical security, etc., and relies on regular risk assessments enabling a company to consistently identify and treat security threats. ISO 27001 is accepted worldwide as an assurance that proper and continual measures have been taken to protect valuable company data.

The SOC audit evaluated the security controls within Aryaka to ensure protection against unauthorized access, unauthorized disclosure of information and damage to systems. In addition, the SOC audit tested these controls to certify that they operate effectively to achieve the promised service level commitments and system requirements. The ISO 27001 provides the information security governance framework on top of which other standards and security controls are built.

“These audits are an effective way to show our current and potential customers the level of commitment Aryaka has in the area of security. It challenges our organization to focus on continuous improvement and service excellence,” says Edward Frye, Chief Information Security Officer of Aryaka. “Security and customer trust form the foundation of Aryaka’s success. Therefore, we must demonstrate our commitment to the highest level of security through continuing recertification audits.”

Please contact Aryaka directly for report details.

Speaking of security, read more about Aryaka’s Managed SASE here and visit our new SASE Academy here to gain a better understanding.

To learn more, the Wiki entry on SOC is here and the entry on ISO 27001 is here.

The post Aryaka Has Successfully Completed SOC 2 and ISO 27001 Recertification Audits appeared first on Aryaka.

Today Aryaka announced several new innovations that set the stage for the next year and more.

These address the growth mandates that CEOs are aiming for, while dealing with unprecedented change, the pace of which has been accelerated by the pandemic over the past two years. Businesses the world over have to contend with previously unimaginable situations like rapid consolidation of their office footprint, closure or relocation of their work environments, rapid shifts in their workforce to be fully or partially remote and all the while ensuring that their productivity, security and collaboration needs are taken care of. All this uncontrolled change creates a tremendous amount of flux in an organization, aside controlled change like M&A or geographical expansion. How then to address growth, when dealing with change all the time?

CEOs are leaning on their CIOs and technology platforms within organizations to manage change. This has led to adoption of Cloud-First architectures and the preference is for such platforms that lend themselves to agility and complex change management.

The wide area network (WAN) connectivity for offices and users, as well as their security have all become highly important in this context, serving as the lifeblood for organizational connectivity, employee productivity and application experience. Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) are two architectural categories that have formed over the years to address these, the latter being more recent and more nascent across the industry.

Acronyms aside, the primary objective is to deliver the best possible network connectivity, security posture and application experience regardless of the location of the user, site, or application, anywhere, with the ability to change the services dynamically based on the needs of the business.

This leads to the four dimensions of the announcement today that cut across the architecture, new products and services, consumption model as well as Aryaka’s support and lifecycle services.

4 Dimensions of the Announcement

Innovations to Break Through the Status Quo

Let’s consider some of the Architectural innovations first.

Introducing Aryaka FlexCore and AppAssure
Aryaka has always been known for its global high-performance network, with its unique POP-architecture and global L2 private core that primarily served as a replacement for traditional MPLS, combining the benefits of the predictability of MPLS with the agility of a cloud- first solution

A “Cloud-First” Architecture Built for Flexibility

The company is bringing in a new L3 private core targeteing Enhanced Internet connectivity, but with the management consistency that Aryaka brings to the mix. Now the L2 private core, highly optimized for performance sensitivy applications is supplemented by the L3 private core that is more optiized for cost and can be an effective substitute for traditional SD-WAN/Internet type of connectivity.

The ability to take advantage of both through the same architecture and being able to switch between one or another gives enterprises a significant degree of flexibility to mange change.

This is also complemeted by AppAssure that provides deep classificaiton, deterministic control and visibility to 3500+ applications “out of the box”.

Next, some of the products and Aryaka services

New SASE offering – Aryaka Prime EZ

With the acquisition of Secucloud in May 2021, we indicated that we’d announce new SASE offerings towards the end of the year. This is debuting under the Aryaka Prime family for SASE and ready for Beta engagements with customers.

The initial offering called Aryaka Prime EZ, leverages the L3 private core along with new Secure Web Gateway (SWG) capabilities with Firewall-as-a-service, web filtering, threat protection etc., consumption friendly pricing and packaging model. We expect an early uptake with small to medium sized enterprises to begin with and to evolve into more complex requirements over a period of time.

There is an intent to have a more advanced SASE offering with the L2 Private core and advanced security capabilities – called Prime Pro – that would be made available as our security capaibitlties evolve and be announced at a future date.

The existing productized solutions with technology partners like Check Point software and Palo Alto networks would continue to be sold and supported based on customer preferences for those firewalls and supported deployment criterial

New SD-WAN and SASE Products

Expanded SD-WAN offerings – Aryaka SmartConnect Pro and SmartConnect EZ

One of the innovations we brought was to radically simplify the consumption model with “T-shirt sized pricing” into the flagship Smartconnect offering. These would start with five t-shirt sizes of S, M, L, XL, XXL to simplify the quoting, deployment, consumption, change management and tracking.

We’re calling this SmartConnect Pro. This offering leverages the existing L2 private core and marries that with the T-shirt sized consumption and packaging.

A brand new managed SD-WAN offering called SmartConnect EZ is also being introduced leveraging the new L3 private core and debuting at an attractive cost point that would make it easy to consider it as a replacement for traditional overlay SD-WAN/Enhanced Internet category and can be combined with last-mile services to have a very compelling deployment.

We expect this to be more attractive to segments and deployments that are more cost-sensitive, and where the high degree of application performance and latency sensitivity is not an issue. It opens up new use-cases for Aryaka customers to bring non-premier sites into the Aryaka managed SD-WAN fold. It also opens up new opportunities for Aryaka channel partners, and we expect this to have strong resonance with a partner-led motion.

By taking advantage of the same underlying POP-based architeture, these new products offer tremendous flexibility to customers to engage with one offering, say SmartConnect EZ and change to other services (like SmartConnect Pro) or a new architecture like Prime EZ with minimal to no disruption and in a graceful manner.

Eventually Aryaka’s SASE is designed to reflect a tightly integrated approach that delivers the best experience with a high-performing network, pervasive security and a service delivery that would be managed or co-managed based on the preference of the customer and/or channel partner

Aryaka Managed SASE

LAN-Like Application Experience | Highly Secure | Easy to Consume

New Lifecycle Service Tiers – Gold & Silver

Aryaka has always been known for its excellence in its managed services and support offering, which is known to go “above and beyond”. In some ways this has been the Gold standard for the industry and has resulted in high ratings.

As we introduce the “EZ line”, we are conscious that that is for more cost-conscious deployments and are therefore introducing a Silver tier of support and services that are aligned with such deployments. Customers with EZ can always upgrade their support services to Gold, thus providing additional flexibility. The “Pro” line would have the Gold tier by default.

Bringing it all together – The power of purposeful design and integration

Eventually customers like Aryaka as the architecture brings together the network and security technology that traditional technology vendors do, with a global network that traditional Telco/s carriers build along with a managed services model that we see from MSPs/SIs and carriers. It is the combination of these three “silos”, brought together in a purposeful manner that allows Aryaka to deliver on the promise of agility and change management.

The power of integration, the flexibility of the architecture and the passion of the people have resulted in a highly tuned offering that scores very highly with customers as evidenced in the likes of the Gartner Voice of the customer 2021.

With these new offerings, as a customer you can be more assured about your choice of architecture with its flexibility, agility and cost of ownership benefits.

As a partner, you can be more excited about the opportunity multiplication and differentiation it brings to your customer to transform their WAN and security.

Please reach out to Aryaka with questions and be sure to watch our “Breakthrough Event” announcing all of these with demos, customers, partners and some seriously fun hosting.

The post Aryaka’s SD-WAN and SASE solutions – What’s new and why should you care? appeared first on Aryaka.

This year, we’re excited to be sharing our thoughts on the big (virtual) stage at the Gartner IOCS, shorthand for IT Infrastructure, Operations, & Cloud Strategies. A real mouthful if you try to handle this on your own instead of going with a managed provider like Aryaka! In any case, SASE will be a hot topic, as well as the continued evolution of the hybrid enterprise and the migration to the cloud. All topics near and dear to our heart!

On December 8th at 11:15 am Pacific Time join our own Shashi Kiran and Hugo Vliegen as they share their perspectives on managed services evolution and offer a look into Aryaka’s new services innovations that span both SD-WAN and SASE, and that will be announced as part of a global unveiling on December 7th.

In the coming day’s you’ll also read about our perspectives on key topics and themes that will be part of the conference, including:

• Disruptive Technologies & Trends
• Cloud Migration Strategies
• Anywhere Infrastructures

At the event, interact with us at our platinum sponsorship virtual booth, where you can chat with our experts, view videos, download content that speaks to your issues and offers answers, and just virtually chill out!

Details of our Gartner session:

Aryaka: C-Suite Perspectives – A Breakthrough Moment for SD-WAN and SASE Architectures

The pandemic has accelerated the need to shift from the legacy network and security models to modern, cloud-first deployments based on SD-WAN and SASE architectures. But the rules of the game have changed! Traditional telcos have lost innovation, and traditional technology vendors are more fragmented than ever. With real-world insights from global technology thought leaders, this session covers ground on an innovative architectural and business model, that allows you to play the game on your terms with simplicity, reduced risk, and amazing flexibility.

Visit our Breakthrough hub site at https://www.aryaka.com/events-webinars/aryaka-breakthrough-live-taking-on-tomorrow/ to learn more or register directly with the discount code LSC40SP to receive a $475 discount on the event.

The day before, on December 7th at 10am PST, join us for a follow-the-sun global broadcast, “Taking on Tomorrow,” introducing our innovations, our renewed partner focus, and how we’re evolving and updating our corporate identity.

View the broadcast at https://www.aryaka.com/events-webinars/aryaka-breakthrough-live-taking-on-tomorrow/

The post Excitement Building for Aryaka’s Breakthrough Announcement – Join Us at Gartner IOCS appeared first on Aryaka.

We’re honored to be recognized by Vertical Systems in their Carrier Managed SD-WAN Services Leaderboard, now for the third year in a row.  Looking at the other providers covered, it is true that we walk amongst giants, but as we all know, giants are not most limber of beings.  They are powerful, but single-mindedly slow and deliberate.  Inertia inevitably rules the movement and direction of a giant. Point giants in a direction and they’ll take off, but they will be slow to adjust course.

As Vertical Systems notes, “The managed SD-WAN market in the U.S. endured the pandemic as service providers installed hundreds of new networks in the extremely challenging conditions throughout the past year,” Rick Malone, principal of Vertical Systems Group said. “Businesses and enterprises accelerated the retirement of MPLS assets and made purchase decisions for SD-WAN solutions that enable more flexible access options and dynamic connectivity.”

They found that, even in the midst of deferred projects and belt-tightening, the SD-WAN market remained very resilient across bandwidth intensive markets as well as sectors that needed to invest in a hybrid workforce strategy. Harder hit verticals, like retail and travel, didn’t accelerate their digital initiatives due to obvious barriers to transformation.

The announcing of the 2020 U.S. Carrier Managed SD-WAN Services Vertical Systems Group LEADERBOARD comes on the heels of Aryaka’s fifth annual 2021 State of the WAN report. For this report, more than 1,350 enterprise companies were surveyed. The Aryaka 2021 State of the WAN report can be found here https://www.aryaka.com/blog/state-of-wan-2021/  It highlights:

• Accelerating fusion of networking and security planning, with almost a third of enterprises stating that they are already deploying what they consider to be a secure access service edge (SASE) architecture.
• A hybrid work environment that will persist after the pandemic recedes, with over 80% stating that they expect over a quarter of workers to remain remote, and over two-thirds desiring flexibility between on-premises and remote deployments.
• A move to managed services for WAN transformation, with over 70% planning to adopt this approach that integrates application optimization, SASE, transport, multi-cloud connectivity, last-mile management, and remote access.

These trends indicate that Aryaka is optimally positioned to continue its trajectory of growth in a market that clearly has started to demand dramatic simplification when it comes to the deployment of ever more complex network and security functions.

Let’s recall that, over a decade ago, the computing and applications world went through a similar transformation. IT practitioners simply realized that handling server installations stood in their way of business agility: upgrading CPUs, memory modules and hard drives, or patching/upgrading the operating system on every server… those time-consuming practices never added business value. Concepts like virtualization enabled could computing and obsoleted the in-house, hands-on server model.

Historically, some geographies have always been far more receptive to a managed services approach in networking. But the growing, universal appeal of managed network services indicates there is a tectonic shift underway, and that more and more enterprises are willing to normalize their network deployment around the same practices they have adopted for applications and computing.

As they do so, they are also increasingly discovering that there are 2 fundamentally different ways to consume managed network services:

1. The traditional network services approach from the trusted giants we alluded to before: a traditional service provider will team up with a DIY SD-WAN/SASE vendor. They will provide a monthly report on network operation. They will abstract every aspect of network ownership. The downside? A lack of agility that simply doesn’t address the needs of the digital age. In any Day 2 trouble-shooting environment, there will be an awkward triangulation between the enterprise customer, the network vendor providing the virtual overlay solution and expertise for that domain, and finally the service provider(s) supporting the physical underlay and the high level (not expert level) support for the combined solution. Slow response times when it comes to fixing user experience issues are well-documented and inevitable.
2. The emerging model of a vertically integrated solution with a global middle mile that guarantees end-to-end application performance and user experience. This has been the model Aryaka was founded on. It delivers a cloud-first approach to networking, simplifying network operations in Day 0-1-2 and providing complete network as well as application performance and visibility for immediate troubleshooting and optimization if issues ever arise. An approach that also delivers on the cloud economy practice of providing a marketplace with best-of-breed solutions that optimally address any enterprise’s architectural and regulatory requirements.

And that is the reason why Aryaka, as the nimble David, is increasingly winning the trust of enterprises against the managed services Goliaths. In a nutshell, it is about fast business outcomes: faster deployment, faster optimization, optimal hybrid could connectivity, optimally tailored security postures and always-on, consolidated visibility, vertically and horizontally.

We are glad to see this reflected as we are once again included in Vertical Systems’ Leaderboard for Managed SD-WAN Services.

Join us for a demo to see how Aryaka can help you transform your SD-WAN and deliver on a SASE solution truly tailored to your enterprise’s needs.

The post Aryaka Declared a Managed SD-WAN Industry Leader by Vertical Systems Group appeared first on Aryaka.

Welcome to the 5th edition of Aryaka’s global State of the WAN Report! It goes without saying that 2020 is a year to be remembered, and 2021 is shaping up to be the same!

This is the industry’s most comprehensive report, polling over 1350 enterprises across every geography and vertical. Common themes this year include the continuing fusion of networking and security based on SD-WAN and SASE architectures, continued work-from-home plans, as well as the common concerns surrounding complexity and application performance.

Looking at some of the key findings, we begin with SASE, top of mind for many planning their next WAN investments. Over a third of the respondees stated that they are currently deploying what they consider to be a SASE architecture, and as we know, this may take many forms in terms of deployment, capabilities, and vendor preference. When asked about capabilities requested, it is not surprising that SD-WAN transport comes out on top. This is followed by Secure Web Gateway (SWG) and Firewall as a Service (FWaaS).

For the deployment approach, the majority intend to leverage a combination of their networking and security vendors, speaking to the importance of solid transport for any WAN transformation.

Moving to the pandemic, a common theme we’ve heard over the past year is that it has accelerated digital transformation, as well as mandating support for a hybrid workplace. On a positive note, some of the security concerns raised a year ago concerning verticals and roles – basically, organizations that did not have experience with a hybrid workplace and how to properly lock down the extended security perimeter – luckily proved to be mostly unfounded. Looking to the future, over 80% expect more than a quarter of employees to remain remote, a finding borne out by other analysts and surveys.

This move to a permanent hybrid work environment of course impacts planning and mandates on-premises and remote worker flexibility, identified by almost 2/3 as critical. A PoP-centric services architecture enables this flexibility.

Moving on to applications, it is not only the total number of applications in use, but focus. Remote collaboration has become top-of-mind, and one example is Zoom, identified by 36% as critical. Other up-and-coming applications include Teams, SAP/HANA, and Slack. This mix of distributed SaaS applications requires a WAN that supports the performance requirements of these demanding applications, something that a cloud-first approach handles exceptionally well.

For deployment, more enterprises have moved down the path from just evaluating the technology to active vendor selection, developing the business case, or deploying. For example, 26% are evaluating vendors, up from 17% in 2019 and 23% in 2020. We expect this trend to only accelerate over the coming year as enterprises move beyond the more tactical considerations of 2020 to more strategic planning in 2021.

Lastly, enterprise managed services acceptance continues to grow, and top requests include application optimization, security, connectivity including the cloud, managed last mile services, and support for remote workers. These are all elements one might expect from a one-stop managed networking and security offering.

Download the full report and the infographic to learn more!

Watch the 2021 SOTW webinar on-demand –

• Global and North America
• EMEA including regional findings
• APAC including regional findings

The post Aryaka’s 5th Annual Global State of the WAN Report appeared first on Aryaka.