The world has become much smaller in the past few decades thanks to globalization. Globalization has long been a core driver for digital transformation for enterprises. Connecting offices, factories, and supply chains needs a digital-first mindset and infrastructure. With the pandemic’s end officially declared by the WHO ^[1] and the reopening of China, recent data released by the IMF predicts that Asia is poised to drive global economic growth^[2] .

China, the global manufacturing hub

With its high economic growth over the past decades and the strategic importance of the Chinese market, China remains at the top of the list for companies to expand and invest in internationally. Combined with the massive shift in the production of goods, China has become the dominant country in manufacturing. However, this has come with challenges in navigating the regulatory and technological environment.

Aryaka has held strategic partnerships with leading Chinese data center and telecom providers Alibaba and others to operate our in-country PoPs (Points-of-Presence) in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong to ensure full compliance with all privacy and data security laws and regulations. Our strategic partners and their affiliates comply with all applicable laws and regulations and maintain necessary permits, licenses, and approvals. For years, Aryaka’s customers have benefited from our global HyperScale PoP infrastructure and integrated WAN optimization and SaaS acceleration for reliable and fast connectivity for onsite and remote users. A few examples of how Small-Medium and Large enterprises leverage our SD-WAN and SASE as service solutions are Social Media platform firm KAWO, Logistics company Transitex, Architecture firm Callison RTKL and Chemical manufacturing company Albemarle.

India to challenge China’s dominant position

At the same time, geopolitical changes and the high growth of India’s economy, population growth, and investment in attracting foreign companies to expand into India are a challenge to China’s dominant position in the global market and an opportunity for companies to diversify their footprint. For many years, India has produced world-class business services companies next to network and software engineers. Aryaka has had a presence in India since our founding 14 years ago and operates four PoPs in the major economic hubs of New Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai, and Bangalore. Companies are within milliseconds of one of our PoPs wherever they choose to invest and build their offices and factories on the Indian subcontinent. Premium Sound Solutions has become one of the world’s leading companies in automotive and consumer sound products. PSS operates facilities worldwide, including China, and has a sales office in India. The Belgium headquartered company relies on our managed services to improve Disaster Recovery and network performance.

Top Five Challenges for Connectivity for China and India

China and India together are forecasted to generate about half of global growth this year ^[2] and be critical countries for international companies as part of their future global supply chain and operations. Keeping or developing business operations in each country has huge potential benefits.

However, enterprise network connectivity in China and India presents local challenges, ranging from the availability and quality of Internet connectivity and access to cloud-based workloads and SaaS applications to providing proof of compliance with local regulations. Poor or unstable Internet connectivity often leads to high latency and packet loss, unreliable access to the cloud, and SaaS impedes productivity, while a lack of compliance risks overall business operations and the delivery of network and security services.

Based on our longstanding experience in operating in both countries, we identified five recurring challenges for enterprises to address. I highlight key aspects of each one in this blog, while this whitepaper explores global enterprises’ top five challenges in securely connecting applications and workloads with employees, sites, customers, and suppliers in China and India.

Challenge 1: Application performance

The combination of regular Internet performance issues and high regulatory compliance creates significant challenges for international businesses to connect their users and mission-critical applications.

Aryaka Solution: Several PoPs in key business metros in China and India provide low latency access and dedicated connectivity to deliver on an optimal network and application performance with consistent SLAs.

Challenge 2: UCaaS and enabling global collaboration

The need for communication and collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, Webex, Zoom, and others continues to accelerate globally. Enabling employees to be their most productive and securely connecting them to the enterprise WAN, no matter where they are located, is of the utmost importance.

Aryaka Solution: Our in-region PoP footprint and multi-segment WAN optimizes connectivity to the different UCaaS/CCaaS gateways within China, India, and internationally. Voice and Video traffic is given highest QoS priority with guaranteed bandwidth allocation to meet user expectations for productivity.

Challenge 3: IP-Based applications

Reliable access to websites and web applications is foundational for any enterprise, so IT Ops must know how to navigate China’s or India’s unpredictable Internet. One frequently proposed solution is a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Still, CDNs have issues supporting business application performance and user expectations due to a reliance on the public Internet.

Aryaka Solution: Our global, scalable WAN – based on a single-pass architecture – offers reliable performance and flexibility to support any application IT deploys, including dynamic IP-based applications, versus optimizing for specific content and sources/destinations.

Challenge 4: Remote worker connectivity

Hundreds of millions of employees in China and India, anywhere really, work, at least partially, remotely. The hybrid workplace is here to stay. The mandate for the CIO and IT is to enable these ‘anywhere’ workers with secure and reliable access to the web and corporate applications and workloads wherever they reside.

Aryaka Solution: Our secure remote access solution, Private Access, deployed in all Hyperscale PoPs, including China and India-based PoP delivers flexibility and security. With the aggregation of traffic from branch and remote users and delivery of common services with consistent network and security policies at our scalable PoPs versus a siloed architecture and point solutions, enterprises benefit from our approach.

Challenge 5: Compliance

In addition to relying on the Internet for connectivity, or a legacy WAN architecture from a managed service provider that is not cloud-ready, is less than ideal. And as mentioned earlier, foreign businesses can face complex compliance rules and requirements in India and China. Establishing a local presence, especially in China, can be difficult. Companies must balance legal and technical needs.

Aryaka Solution: Our strategic partners and their affiliates comply with all applicable laws and regulations and maintain the necessary permits, licenses, and approvals to deliver on this requirement. Our global PoP footprint and dual-layer core backbone remove the unpredictable nature of the public Internet.

Aryaka Regional Asia PoP Footprint and Cloud Onramps

We operate a global core network consisting of a dual-layer backbone with PoPs on six continents providing optimal cost and performance connectivity to and from China and India and beyond. Our Network Architecture whitepaper goes into details about the setup of our PoP and global backbone with onramps to hundreds of cloud resources.

In Conclusion

No matter where enterprises set up their manufacturing presence, our longstanding expertise, experience and partnerships in China and India, combined with our global network and security architecture delivered as a managed service, provide enterprises a trusted partner for their SD-WAN and SASE as a service.

Download our paper Addressing the Top Five Connectivity Challenges for China and India to learn more.

[1] https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/05/1136367

[2] https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/05/01/asia-poised-to-drive-global-economic-growth-boosted-by-chinas-reopening

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The enterprise ecosystem has become exceedingly global and mobile over time, while the need for collaboration is stronger than ever. Partners, suppliers and customers have become a part of an integrated supply chain that needs access to these centrally hosted applications from anywhere in the world. As a result, client server access and WAN needs have changed. IT teams are now faced with the unique challenge of making these applications, that have traditionally been behind the firewall, available to public users.

This raises two major issues that must be addressed:

Outside of the Firewall

In some cases, applications can be migrated to the public Internet, and, in those instances, content delivery network (CDN) solutions become a “must have.” CDN solutions provide acceleration for outside-of-the-firewall websites. Traditional CDNs use DNS-based load balancing and edge caching to provide an optimal experience for static websites. However, as dynamic applications have become more common, the need for next-generation CDNs has intensified. For a next-generation CDN to solve the problems raised by dynamic applications, it must provide additional features like stable middle mile performance, end-to-end bi-directional traffic acceleration, and optimization for non-HTTP applications.

Behind the Firewall

Applications that sit behind the firewall for security reasons have remained stuck in the 90’s. The standard practice is to setup a VPN concentrator and have the end users securely access their critical applications via VPN. This approach suffers from the same problems that plagued the web sites in the 90’s: slow performance over large distances when using the Internet.

This is because the middle mile over the Internet is a shared medium. And even though its availability within a region may be plentiful, across peering points and during rush hour there is still tremendous congestion, packet loss, and poor performance. Poor application performance, especially in the enterprise space, results in low adoption rates and lost productivity.

One option enterprises have turned to is the deployment of multiple VPN concentrators. But this method adds layers of complexity and cost, harkening back to the era where web sites deployed web servers in every region.

Instead of deploying tens of concentrators around the world, the ideal solution is to provide optimal performance and connectivity to a centralized VPN concentrator. This can and must be achieved by next-generation dynamic CDN solutions.

Requirements for a Remote Dynamic Content Delivery Network Solution

If you are looking for an ideal solution for delivering dynamic application acceleration to remote and mobile users, consider the following issues before making a decision:

• Are your users regional or truly global, with a footprint into the Americas, Asia Pacific and Europe? If global, the best solution is one built over a dedicated private network, to completely bypass the unreliable public Internet for IP application delivery. This would enable end users to experience stable latency and consistency in application performance.
• For dynamic applications, ensure that the solution includes intelligent features like TCP optimization and persistent connection capabilities to provide acceleration benefits.
• Ensure the solution is application agnostic and not limited to only one or two applications like SSL VPN, as some vendors provide other possible use cases like Citrix, FTP server and RDP.

The First Clientless SD-WAN: SmartACCESS

As of now, there is only one such next-generation solution on the market. Aryaka’s SmartACCESS is the first clientless SD-WAN solution with built-in dynamic CDN. It delivers:

• Up to 3x faster application performance for remote and mobile users
• Consolidated and simplified VPN infrastructure
• Enhanced security and visibility of all remote and mobile user activity
• Global deployment in hours, with the ability to scale in minutes

Aryaka SmartACCESS: The First Clientless SD-WAN for Remote Access

The SmartACCESS service is built over Aryaka’s global private network, which enables remote and mobile employees to bypass the unreliable public Internet.

SmartACCESS uses dynamic CDN capabilities in the following ways:

• Global Load Balancing: Remote and mobile employees can use a single domain name to connect to the VPN concentrator (and corporate resources) without having to change local VPN settings or worrying about where they are.
• Dynamic IP App Acceleration:
  • SmartACCESS accelerates all IP-based (HTTP and non-HTTP) traffic to global users. The acceleration is application agnostic.
  • It includes TCP Optimization, which speeds up application delivery through more aggressive TCP transfers, improving congestion control and congestion avoidance.
• Intelligent DNS-Based Routing: Mobile and remote employees automatically get directed to the most optimal POP for the best application performance.
• Clientless Mobile Acceleration:
  • The end user doesn’t need to go through additional security hoops, as SmartACCESS works in the background. This also prevents user error.
  • There is no need to deploy multiple VPN concentrators or load balancers, significantly reducing your IT department’s global hardware and software investment.
• BYOD Support: SmartACCESS works with all devices and operating systems.

Your remote and mobile workforce, as well as customers, partners, and suppliers, deserve the same quality connectivity that you provide for your employees in branch offices or at your headquarters. And now you can provide it with SmartACCESS, the first clientless SD-WAN that allows you to optimize your network for dynamic content over VPN.

To learn more about SmartACCESS, download our latest data sheet.

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Slow access, frequent disconnects, and poor application performance are the constant complaints from end users to network/IT admins, and something that bodes poorly for productivity and success of the organizations to which those end users belong.

In today’s global business landscape, remote access to data and applications from anywhere in the world is a critical tool. The rise of a remote and mobile workforce means more employees are capable of accessing company information while on the road and away from the corporate headquarters or branch offices. Global enterprises are also partnering with companies in different geographies to outsource or optimize business processes, and they need those employees and partners to access corporate applications in remote locations as well.

Where Do VPNs Fail?

Remote access methods like VPNs can fail in a number of ways: They may be very slow, or they may time out. Users may be able to access the network, but find that download/upload times are excruciatingly long or have much worse performance than they would expect if they were in the office.

The fundamental problem is the Internet.

VPNs leverage this public network of networks, which has multiple bottlenecks. Like a public highway, the Internet can become congested at peak times, causing slowdowns and standstills. If you are at a long distance from your end-point, it will take you longer to get where you’re going, especially if you have a lot of data to deliver.

The unpredictable variation in latency (along with high latency), means that slowdowns in speed and performance of applications are almost inevitable. The Internet is also a lossy network, where congestion along the highway leads to packet loss, continued slowdown, and poor application performance.

How Do Companies Currently Solve VPN Problems?

The current methods for solving poor remote access performance are costly and/or ineffective. For example:

• Wait to get Better Network Access
  When remote and mobile users experience slow VPN performance, they might just wait to get network access thinking that the Internet on the last mile may not be good enough. The wait is often futile as the problem lies in the middle mile.
• Deploy Multiple VPN Concentrators
  When companies have a pressing need to scale, they turn to the IT team to deploy multiple VPN concentrators all over the world. This complex solution is costly and hard to manage, which introduces new problems that will hinder the success of your deployment.
• Use Alternate Methods
  Some workers attempt to work around VPN issues by simply sending emails and asking others to deliver messages and files. This can lead to miscommunication and loss of information.
• Use Shadow IT
  The point of using VPN is to keep information safe. When VPNs fail, some workers upload files and attempt to access information through cloud applications like Dropbox, which are not authorized by the enterprise. This is a huge security risk, as well as a lack of compliance.

A Solution for Today’s Remote Access Performance Needs

Aryaka’s solution, SmartACCESS, solves the challenges of slow and unpredictable VPN performance by taking the Internet out of the equation.

SmartACCESS is the first clientless SD-WAN for remote access. It is the only solution that combines dynamic CDN capabilities with SD-WAN technology to deliver reliable, fast and predictable remote access anywhere in the world. Delivered as a cloud-based service, enterprises can deploy it in hours and scale in minutes.

Aryaka SmartACCESS combines dynamic CDN capabilities with SD-WAN technology to deliver fast and reliable application performance anywhere in the world for remote and mobile employees.

By building our own private network of 28 points of presence (PoPs) around the world, we’ve put 95% of the world’s business users  within 30ms or less from the closest end-point. These PoPs are fully meshed into a fully managed global private network.

This private network, which also can be optimized for faster application performance, bypasses the latency and packet loss issues experienced on the public Internet and replaces the need for your in-house IT team to deploy and manage multiple concentrators.

This makes your applications fast and predictable, and supports all those who require access to your corporate network– no matter where in the world they travel and work.

As a clientless solution it also allows enterprises to continue using their existing VPN technology without disrupting security models, enabling global business and expansion initiatives immediately. It supports all corporate applications, including on-premises and cloud/SaaS applications that can be backhauled over a data center connected by secure networks.

SmartACCESS enables IT to realize the full benefit of their VPN investment and ensures a more productive remote workforce.

Stop hating your VPN and start working smarter with Aryaka’s SmartACCESS. Learn more in our datasheet here.

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How many times have you heard that content is king? If you’re in the content creation business, probably more times than you care to remember. But if you can’t get your content to your audience in a timely fashion, your king has just been dethroned.

For IT organizations, content is more than just a viral video or Tweet-worthy news story. Your web resources are the face of the business to the rest of the world and your business-critical applications house the content employees, customers, and partners need every day. Those resources and applications are your crown jewels, and all of that content must be delivered at the speed users expect no matter what industry or sector you are in.

Enterprises today are spending millions of dollars to ensure that their end users have the best possible web experiences. That’s why the Content Delivery Network (CDN) market is on the rise.

However, it’s easy to become overwhelmed when considering CDN providers. There are dozens of options on the market and IT decision makers need to keep a few things in mind when trying to choose the right one:

1. What type of content will you deliver?

This seems like a basic question, but it’s an important one — and one that you as an IT leader might not necessarily know without talking to your business stakeholders.

As you might imagine, different types of content require different solutions. Photo and video content requires much more bandwidth than text content, and the need increases when the content becomes dynamic and personalized.

If most of your content is static, evaluate vendors that have a good number of POPs dedicated to your resources. It’s common for CDN vendors to boast about the size of their networks in terms of the number of servers or POPs they have around the world. But the key question for savvy CDN consumers is: How much of that POP footprint (and those servers) is guaranteed to be available for your content?

For dynamic content, “bigger” is not an advantage at all. What matters is the quality of the end-to-end connectivity, the intelligence of the middle mile, and the optimization software stack.

There are CDNs that do a fairly decent job at caching video or long-tail content locally. If you are a streaming media company, go for it! But if you’re an enterprise with premium delivery requirements, and you have business users accessing your website frequently, you better watch out for their global cache eviction policy. In those cases, look for CDNs that have an enterprise focus.

If you intend to accelerate your customer-facing portals or web applications — or for that matter, any dynamic, personalized or bi-directional web content — caching isn’t going to help. Instead, you need to look for vendors that offer dynamic site acceleration services.

2. Where in the world are your most important users?

Content knows no boundaries and doesn’t care whether someone is viewing it in California or Croatia. The most important thing for an organization is to ensure that people have the same quality experience with your content no matter where in the world they are located.

This can have a huge bearing on your CDN purchase decision. How well can the chosen solution scale with your business? Will it involve significant additional expense? Do you have a significant end user presence in China? In India? In Europe?

Organizations need to ensure that their CDN provider has POPs that are geographically close to their end-user footprint. If end users are spread around the globe, decision makers need to opt for a vendor who has POPs on all six continents where the world’s business happens.

3. Do you want a 30-year-old gas guzzler or a state-of-the-art roadster?

Any car that runs can get you from point A to point B, but many people want more than that. Just like with cars, you get what you pay for with a CDN.

If you’re going to need global visibility or responsive support, tacking them onto the low-cost option could cost you more in the long run. So, do your planning now and map out what your future needs will most likely be.

This stage of the process is a good time to clarify with your vendor whether or not security and protection against DDoS are included in the package. Make sure you consider these components as part of the total cost of ownership (TCO). If you don’t, one single attack could take your site down at an important time and destroy ROI.

While we’re talking about uptime, you will also want to evaluate the opportunity costs of performance lags and downtime from any cause. Enterprises need to look for a solution that justifies their ROI in terms of performance and uptime. Any service offering a 99.99% percent uptime SLA can be a pretty safe bet here; anything below that counts as an opportunity cost.

4. Is your CDN provider easy to work with?

From a business perspective, it always makes sense to go with a vendor that is transparent and easy to do business with. Some market leaders become overly confident in their status and start treating their customers with disrespect.

Usually, unless they’re in monopoly spaces, this means they won’t be the market leader for much longer. If you get a sense that all the vendor really cares about is the sale, it should be a red flag.

Also, some CDN vendors still price on the basis of Million Page Views (MPV) – ask any seasoned IT decision maker how much of a pain this can turn out to be. Modern CDN pricing is based on GBs delivered for whole site delivery and Mbps bandwidth used for dynamic content.

5. Does your CDN support personalized content delivery?

Personalized content delivery is pretty much non-negotiable these days. Real-time personalization and targeting on the basis of geography, behavioral triggers, cookies, and devices has immense value and can turn someone from a casual fan into diehard patron or subscriber.

For instance, mobile-optimized content needs to be delivered to end users who are accessing a web resource from their smartphones — which is just about everyone these days. And don’t forget the need to make quality adjustments on the fly based on the subscriber profile, device used, and content being consumed.

When your users experience lag time or slow content performance, they’ll abandon you for another content provider in an instant. You need to be able to deliver an experience that doesn’t frustrate them.

Make sure your CDN vendor supports customization and flexibility — and has the network in place to support that functionality.

6. Can I get some help?

If these five questions don’t answer all of your concerns, now is the time to ask an expert for advice.

Every CDN provider should be willing to discuss your unique requirements with you. They should put your problems first, and they should offer a proof of concept, so you can try before you buy.

Consult with them, and since you’ll be talking to more than one service provider, remember to do a reality check by comparing the answers you receive from each one.

Then, arrange for proof of concepts from the top one or two vendors on your shortlist. Make sure this is a real-world trial, not just a test environment. You want to see how this technology performs through the eyes of your end users.

These steps add time and effort to the process, but in the end, you’ll be confident in the CDN you choose since you took the time to make sure it aligns with your needs and goals.

If you’d like Aryaka to help you out with your content delivery needs, contact us today and we will be happy to set up a consultation.

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Industry experts believe that old legacy systems are unable to handle the exponential surge in passenger volume, fleet sizes, along with increasing customer expectations and global expansion of airline companies.

For the airlines industry, the importance of global network connectivity ranges from business- to mission-critical. When network connectivity is lost or application performance is impacted, airlines and their passengers suffer greatly—from flight delays, misplaced luggage, service degradation, and more.

For those reasons, Air China partnered with Aryaka to leverage our global SD-WAN and boost the performance of the company’s web portals and website.

Airlines with progressive visions are rethinking their networks and strengthening the backbone of their global applications before they embark on the digital transformation journey.

Here are five compelling reasons why airlines need to pay greater attention to their global networks.

1. Cloud and Digital Transformation is Everywhere

The needs and expectations of airlines, their partners, business customers, and passengers have changed with the evolution of the technology landscape. Today’s consumers demand faster access to services, on a diverse set of devices, and a customized, personalized user experience. Businesses have turned to the cloud and SaaS to be able to cater to these demands.

As a result, airlines are increasingly relying on cloud services to provide better business execution, unlock new revenue channels, and lower costs. Aryaka’s global airline and transportation customers can realize over 200 percent improvement in the performance of all their cloud services and SaaS-based applications, regardless of where they are hosted.

2. Performance of Mission-Critical Applications

The aviation industry is complicated, extremely regulated, and has very low tolerance for failure or mishaps. Airlines around the world rely on global applications for mission-critical activities, which include passenger check-in, flight operations, departure control applications, etc.

The enterprise network is the chain that connects various globally distributed stakeholders with these mission-critical applications, ERP and CRM apps, social media, and more. Airlines require a global network that provides them with fast, reliable network connectivity and optimal application performance.

Existing connectivity options do not support the performance needs of mission-critical applications. The current options that organizations are relying on is the congested public internet, which is susceptible to inconsistent latencies and packet loss, or MPLS, which is rigid and expensive.

3. Operational Efficiency Can Make or Break Airlines

Airlines continue to expand globally, add newer destinations, cater to an ever-rising demand at every location and deal with vast amounts of critical passenger information, yet work with increasingly slim gross margins. Hence, what often differentiates the more profitable airlines from the rest is operational efficiency. And one of the most critical elements of operational and process efficiency is global network connectivity.

Aryaka offers airlines a global connectivity solution designed for mission-critical applications required for business execution. Airlines only need to connect to one of Aryaka’s globally distributed Points of Presence (PoPs) to ride their traffic over a cloud-native global private network, which delivers low latency, negligible packet loss, and consistently high application performance. In addition, Aryaka’s fully managed service can be up and running in days or hours, compared to the months it takes with legacy network infrastructures such as MPLS.

For rapidly expanding global airline companies, Aryaka can be a huge advantage as setting up operations at a new location and deploying high-performance network connectivity becomes a lot less hassle-free and faster, without the need for expensive hardware and an army of network engineers.

4. Emerging Markets Will Play a Greater Role

Most American and European Airlines are now trying to enter emerging markets like China, India, South Asia, Africa, and Latin America. To cater to this burgeoning customer base, airlines need to expand their footprint, which necessitates significant investments in global network connectivity.

The problem here is that regional network service providers in these regions and others in the Middle East and Asia still bank on unreliable legacy network technologies like MPLS and IP-VPN. And network inefficiencies at even one or a few locations tend to snowball across the entire network, incurring severe consequences.

5. Customer Experience Reigns Supreme

From the time passengers log into a web portal to book tickets to when they pick up their checked-in luggage at their destination and walk out of the airport, airlines make a significant investment in time and resources to ensure a great customer experience. Here, the speed and responsiveness of airline web applications and customer portals play a crucial role.

Using a dynamic content delivery network such as Aryaka’s SmartCDN can accelerate the performance of both static and dynamic web content, delivering a smooth lag-free experience to end users.

When Air China moved to Aryaka, the airline saw cache hit rates improve more than 99 percent (offloading over 99 percent of static content onto edge cache servers) and loading times reduce considerably. This greatly improved the airline’s web experience globally.

Connectivity for the Global Enterprise

Progressive airlines are increasingly realizing that digital transformation is no longer a thing of ‘when the time comes’- it’s a survival strategy in this highly competitive market. Air China’s move to upgrade their network performance is a prime examples of airlines planning to create a digital strategy for their businesses. And the success of any digital transformation relies on a solid foundation –a network to back up the aggressive real-time demands of a digital enterprise.

Whether you’re an airline struggling to deliver optimal connectivity and application performance over legacy network solutions, or a business in a different industry segment, Aryaka offers global connectivity solutions that are flexible, high-performance, and easy to manage.

Find out what Aryaka can do for your business by giving us a try and observe the benefits first hand!

The post 5 Reasons SD-WAN is Critical for Global Airlines like Air China appeared first on Aryaka.

Sometimes there is confusion between what a Software Defined-WAN (SD-WAN) does and what a Content Distribution Network (CDN) can do.  After all, both are used to speed up the performance of applications, but for two different areas.

The simple answer:

• SD-WANs are typically used by enterprises to ensure employees get optimal performance when accessing corporate applications.
• CDNs are most often used by companies offering application or information services to cache their content close to customers to ensure they can deliver the best possible user experience.

That’s a good starting point, but there are some overlapping use cases that can muddy the picture, as we’ll see.

A typical SD-WAN customer may have a data center in Santa Clara and users throughout the US, Europe and the Middle East.  They would have brought in SD-WAN when it became too expensive to scale MPLS for exploding bandwidth needs, or when the company couldn’t afford the long lead times required to make network changes.

A business could deploy and SD-WAN in days for global connectivity. However, some SD-WAN products rely on the best effort, public Internet for long-haul connectivity, which negatively impacts mission-critical application performance when used as a transport. Private network-based SD-WAN, such as services provide by Aryaka, optimize and route traffic over a dedicated and secure WAN backbone. This results in faster and more consistent application response times for end users no matter where they are located around the globe.

The role of CDNs

CDNs, on the other hand, are typically used to stage content closer to their consumers. A news organization, for example, might worry that a large news event would swamp centralized web servers.  Signing up for a CDN would enable it to replicate and cache its content on servers around the world.  Now when news breaks, visitors would be served from local servers and there is little chance service would be delayed or interrupted.

Some Software as a Service companies also use CDNs to stage content closer to customers in an effort to bolster the performance of their network-based services, and that’s an instance where SD-WANs can come into play as well.

Just because a SaaS company uses a CDN, doesn’t mean the performance of that SaaS service will be adequate for all customers.  After all, customers come in all shapes and sizes and can be located anywhere, and the CDN in question will only provide the needed performance boost for some percentage of the SaaS customer base.

Some of both

Given that, some customers may opt to use an SD-WAN service to make sure employees are getting the best possible experience out of the SaaS offering.  Traffic from remote branches rides Aryaka’s global, private SD-WAN and is pumped right into the SaaS data center.

For example, City & Guilds Group, the $195 million global leader in skills development offering everything from eLearning to executive coaching, deployed Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN to tie users in the UK, India, New Zealand and the Americas to the organization’s instance of Office 365 hosted in Microsoft’s data center in Dublin, Ireland.

Using an SD-WAN also ensures enterprises can optimize the performance of all their SaaS tools, instead of having to tackle SaaS performance issues application by application.  That’s a huge time saver because, by some counts, companies use an average of 16 SaaS apps today and that number is climbing rapidly.

Since the roles of SD-WANs and CDNs are rather distinct, it wouldn’t be surprising to find companies that use both.  That news organization that uses a CDN to stage content around the world, might also decide to use a SD-WAN to rapidly scale the bandwidth of its WAN backbone while optimizing the performance of applications accessed by employees over that network.

In fact, Aryaka offers both SD-WAN and CDN services.  However, unlike the classic CDN networks focused on content caching, Aryaka’s CDN is used by application providers to support dynamic content that is transactional in nature, requiring a lot of interaction between the user, the server, and the application.  In these cases, there is very little to cache, so the performance of the network is key.  Aryaka’s optimized, secured, managed backbone delivers.

Air China partnered with Aryaka to leverage our global SD-WAN and boost the performance of the company’s web portals and website. When they made the switch to Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN and CDN services, the airline saw cache hit rates improve more than 99 percent and loading times reduce considerably. This greatly improved the airline’s web experience for customers around the world.

So while both SD-WANs and CDNs help speed the delivery of applications, they both play a critical role in helping enterprises get the most out of their online resources. We invite you to learn more about our Global SD-WAN and CDN services. Contact Aryaka today to schedule a meeting with one of our expert consultants.

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1. Video Conferencing is up dramatically

At Aryaka, we optimize various video conferencing services (i.e., 8×8, Blue Jeans, ZOOM, Teams, and more), and just in the last six weeks, video traffic into China increased by more than three times. Face-to-face interaction is clearly an essential tool in remaining productive. Increased video is a prevalent traffic trend we have observed across companies of all sizes in all industry verticals.

2. High-Tech workers have left the campus

The graph at the left is the WAN usage profile of a US West Coast Software company, where over the last two weeks, employees have left the campus and moved home. Traffic over the Aryaka Global core has temporarily dropped as the company is in the process of transitioning many of its employees to Aryaka’s Secure Remote Access solution, accelerating connectivity and improving the user experience for mobile users.

3. Knowledge workers are now working from home

The graph below is from a Fortune 100 company using Aryaka’s Secure Remote Access solution for their mobile users. Since the end of February, their mobile usage jumped by almost 3X as COVID-19 made its way around the globe.

4. Manufacturing companies just keep humming

Dozens of manufacturing companies showed mostly flat WAN traffic over the last couple of months. This may well be because the Aryaka Global solution has enabled these companies to build a resilient global network infrastructure that just keeps humming and prevents disruption.

5. Some companies have slowed or shut down

Unfortunately, we also have observed some companies slowing down, with some even closing entirely. Luckily, this represents a minority of companies. These are typically smaller companies with labor-intensive operations and services that require the on-site presence of employees and find it impossible to offer their services with a remote workforce model.

6. We are working more during weekends

It appears there is more traffic on Aryaka’s private core network on the weekends than usual, indicating that employees are working more during these hours. This trend is confirmed by several articles published this week – here’s a typical statement: “..the US had seen the biggest time extension of the normal working day, adding an extra three hours. In the UK, France, Spain, and Canada, working hours have increased by an average of two hours per day ..”. I often find myself now more than usual behind my laptop responding to company emails during or after binge-watching TV shows and movies, as I typically did on weekends before this global phenomenon.

Disaster preparedness requires WAN networks built for change

This pandemic will inevitably end, and many companies have realized that a proper disaster recovery plan should include the ability of their employees to work from home at a moment’s notice without compromising productivity, data security, and effective collaboration. Delivering high-performance private WAN connectivity is not without challenges during a major disaster because broadband networks will be heavily stressed. It is telling that Netflix and Facebook are reducing video quality amid this crisis to reduce the strain on the internet.

The challenge is that most companies cannot afford to keep two high-performance private WAN networks up and running for both corporate sites and home offices. Aryaka provides the ability to reallocate private core bandwidth from the enterprise site to the home, the mobile user, the cloud, and to the Data Center with unmatched agility – provisioning times often take far less than 24 hours. And Aryaka’s WAN-as-a-Service delivery model means that changes are implemented through automated orchestration in SmartManage. Aryaka’s support team helps customers with zero-touch installation and configuration of systems – whenever, wherever.

The post 6 WAN Insights: How The Global Pandemic Changes Enterprise Traffic Patterns appeared first on Aryaka.

Startups are introducing new ways of using innovative cloud-based architectures and challenging legacy technologies to conduct business cheaper and faster. Additionally, technology sectors such as security and WAN are collapsing into the CDN industry.

All this change is good for the buyers of these services because they have more choices than ever before — however, with the abundance of choices, it’s easy to get confused about what exactly buyers are getting, as vendors market themselves in similar ways.

Traditional CDNs focus on the caching and delivery of static content. Video CDNs improve video streaming (live and VOD) experiences using encoding and repackaging technologies. Security CDNs provide Web Application Firewall (WAF) and DDoS Mitigation services via scrubbing centers. A different class of CDNs is focused on accelerating personalized, dynamic content.

Aryaka’s SmartCDN falls in this last category. SmartCDN is an innovative and unique, high-performance CDN platform built to deliver and accelerate dynamic IP applications. We’ve built a full-service global CDN from the ground up, tailored to meet the needs of global SaaS providers, e-commerce companies, and other worldwide enterprises.

Here are three reasons why Aryaka’s SmartCDN is something that today’s businesses must consider deploying

1) Custom-built Platform For Dynamic Content Delivery

Aryaka’s SmartCDN solution is built to

Aryaka’s SmartCDN solution is built to address the needs of dynamic applications and focused on accelerating truly personalized, bi-directional content for every request, and provides a reliable and fast network pathway globally for dynamic content.

Traditional CDN’s provide dynamic content acceleration capability by bolting on some of the required functionality on top of their existing architectures, which are highly optimized for static content delivery. Some CDN vendors claim to do “dynamic content delivery” while only supporting cached pages with a short TTL that can be shared with all users for a period of a few seconds. These solutions don’t work for the transaction-oriented bi-directional interactive applications that the industry is moving towards.

In addition to providing HTTP(s) acceleration, Aryaka’s SmartCDN can also accelerate the performance at the TCP level for non-HTTP(S) applications. It also works well for mobile applications. SmartCDN is a truly application-agnostic dynamic content delivery platform.

2) Dynamic Content Delivery Is Provided over a Global Private Network

Aryaka is one of very few providers that offers a CDN service powered by a global private network infrastructure. This means traffic spends less time on the public Internet and more time on our global private network, which is built by aggregating multiple layer-2 point-to-point links from top-tier telcos worldwide.

This technology is a stark contrast to traditional CDN solutions that rely on the public Internet for content delivery. A few solutions attempt to accelerate access by routing traffic through the “path of least resistance”,” but packet loss and jitter are unavoidable on the middle mile of the public Internet, adversely affecting web and SaaS application performance.

Traditional CDNs do a good job of improving performance for static content by building high-end caching platforms. However, this doesn’t work for dynamic apps and interactive content that can never be cached. The true judge of dynamic content delivery is the middle mile’s quality, intelligence, and functionality since the content needs to be retrieved from the origin server every time it is accessed.

3) Content Delivery Purpose-Built for the Global Enterprise

Beyond providing a dedicated pathway for global dynamic content, Aryaka’s SmartCDN is a feature-rich, highly optimized dynamic IP application delivery platform. It includes TCP optimization to supercharge the delivery of TCP applications using innovative techniques and provides access to advanced, real-time network and application visibility, and analytics on website traffic patterns in order to troubleshoot, report, and aid in more informed decision-making

Download our Solution Overview and Datasheet for more information.

Yet the best way to experience what Aryaka’s SmartCDN can do for your dynamic IP applications is by evaluating its performance in your own environment. Contact us for a free Proof of Concept today!

The post 3 Reasons to consider Aryaka’s SmartCDN for your Global Business appeared first on Aryaka.

‘Integrated with Oracle Cloud’ implies that customers with data and applications destined to the cloud will experience peak performance across the Aryaka core or when connecting from the branch.  And, our presence on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace offers customers a simple way to consume our SD-WAN service.

Aryaka’s SmartCONNECTSD-WAN is a fully managed service, a single solution optimizing application performance and enabling global multi-cloud connectivity. It deploys in hours and offers reliable and stable performance for Oracle’s cloud services. Global enterprises benefit from direct network access to cloud data and applications from any region in the world using Aryaka’s 30+ Points of Presence (PoPs), reaching 95% of the world’s business users. Aryaka’s solution delivers up to 8 times faster application performance compared to existing network options, providing access to business-critical applications in 30 milliseconds or less.

As part of the company’s fully managed SD-WAN as a Service, Aryaka offers the choice of how to connect sites to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, including FastConnect for direct access or IPsec VPNs. Our service offering helps enterprises easily connect with users in the following ways:

• Enterprise to Cloud – Access to Oracle Cloud for users at headquarters, branch offices and remote locations through a software-defined, application optimized, global private network with a choice of FastConnect or IP VPN
• Cloud to Cloud – Enterprise-wide access to multiple Oracle Cloud data centers (e.g., home region and alternate regions)
• Multi-Cloud – Enterprise-wide access to applications hosted simultaneously on Oracle and other infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) or software as a service (SaaS) platforms

We expect the number of customers leveraging Oracle Cloud to grow in the future on the basis of a strong investment and expansion program that will almost double the number of regions served over the next year.

Learn more by visiting us at this week’s Oracle Open World in San Francisco, booth 2204 or sign up for a meeting here.

The post Big Red and Big Teal: Aryaka Oracle Cloud Integration appeared first on Aryaka.