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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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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Many of you may have heard about virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), a smaller percentage may have used the technology, and of these, I’m sure many of you all have experiences to share, the good, the bad, and the ugly. VDI on its own is a great concept, combining security, remote management, anywhere availability of applications and data, and the ability to quickly deploy these capabilities to far-flung workers such as with Business Process Outsourcing or customer care. Pre-COVID, some verticals such as financial services embraced VDI for security. Unfortunately, the promise many times didn’t meet the expectations due to poor internet connectivity, underpowered clients, less than cooperative protocols, and even server-side issues. At times, when the experience was subpar and therefore nonproductive, it could be difficult to find the source of the issue.

Thanks to advancements in cloud infrastructure, VDI has evolved into a new and potentially lucrative force to be reckoned with. Only now, instead of VDI, it’s being repackaged as Desktop as-a-Service (DaaS). Yes, it’s another four-letter “as-a-Service” acronym to add to your cloud naming repertoire that includes the likes of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, etc. Where VDI was primarily deployed as an on-premises solution, with enterprise IT responsible for deployment and operation, the formal DaaS definition is as a cloud-delivered service. Basically, the likes of AWS and Azure hosting virtual machines that deliver the desktop experience remotely. DaaS offers the same advantages of the cloud consumption model for compute and storage – OPEX-only, scalability, flexibility, simplicity – now delivered to the desktop.

Source: [Microsoft]

This figure shows the differences in responsibilities between a VDI solution and DaaS, where everything in light blue is now part of the cloud managed service

DaaS-type approaches are receiving renewed interest due to the pandemic and the flexibility offered to the hybrid workplace, and in fact, at the beginning of August, Microsoft announced a new DaaS Windows offering spanning SMB through the largest of enterprises. The service includes a choice of vCPUs, memory, and storage. This in addition to existing offers from others including Citrix, VMware, and even CSPs like AWS that support both Windows and Linux virtual desktops.

As with VDI, the crux of any DaaS implementation will be internet connectivity, both on-premises and for remote workers. For on-premises, the enterprise must understand traffic requirements – bandwidth, latency, etc. – and where their DaaS is hosted. Though the absolute bandwidth required, from 100 Kbps at the low end to 2 Mbps+ with video, is not excessive, it must be consistent. And remember this is multiplied by the number of employees.

Existing site bandwidth and approaches to resiliency may in fact be inadequate or the topology, if based on legacy technologies like MPLS, which is a service non-optimized for the new traffic patterns. Remember that if the WAN connection is down, workers using traditional laptops/desktops will be able to carry on their work in some capacity. With DaaS, this is no longer an option, and here is where the advantages of a managed and resilient WAN service that also integrates traffic optimization become obvious.

Support for DaaS within a home environment is even more challenging. Home workers many times share their internet connections with others in the household, subscribe to services with high oversubscription, and may be based in locations where the local ISP is barely adequate. Before making the leap to DaaS for the home worker, internet requirements must be understood and whether the employee must be upgraded to a corporate-sponsored business internet tier. As with on-premises, resiliency is a must.

One of the last considerations is cost, with fresh memories of cloud cost overruns and the creation of companies focused solely on cloud cost containment. If implemented properly – license transfers from on-premises to DaaS, VM right-sizing, continued maintenance of the employee’s desktop (no, DaaS doesn’t operate in thin air), increased site bandwidth, etc. – DaaS should be cost-neutral at worst, show advantages attuned to the cloud consumption model at-best, and 3rd parties place the multi-year TCO benefit at 30-50%. But still, something to be aware of. A few years back, Gartner published a comparison of some of the benefits and challenges of the three desktop consumption models – the PC, VDI, and DaaS – good guidance if and when planning to introduce DaaS.

Looking ahead, in a world of hybrid workers and increasing demands for flexibility and security, DaaS should play an even larger role in IT decision-making. In fact, according to recent Gartner research, almost three quarters of I&O leaders have already implemented DaaS or plan to invest in it over the next 12-24 months. This, if the connectivity, resiliency, and cost considerations described earlier are addressed during the planning stages.

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Aryaka customer Mark Baker, CTO of Pilot Freight Services, recently said that to be a successful IT leader you must, “Plan for the worst, hope for the best.” It’s a commonly held wisdom, especially in the networking and security world of IT, that has helped Aryaka customers like Pilot Freight Services address the technology challenges presented by the global pandemic. Pilot Freight Services was nimble in their transition to remote work because of all the critical work they had done prior by moving to a cloud-based architecture with Aryaka’s managed SD-WAN solution as the foundation. Though they dealt with other challenges, network performance was not one of them.

The results from our recent global customer survey conducted in partnership with third-party research firm TechValidate echoes this sentiment. When we asked our customers about the benefits of Aryaka throughout the global pandemic, 73% of respondents cited stable, reliable network performance for global remote users and 59% responded that it’s easy and quick to set up new sites (similarly, almost half cited flexible bandwidth).

Most Aryaka customers, like many organizations globally, needed to quickly enable large remote workforces, essentially overnight in 2020. Aryaka’s fast, reliable network performance – no matter an end-user’s location, on-site or at-home – combined with the ability to spin up sites in a matter of hours and the flexibility to move bandwidth as needed, allowed our customers to provide their newly remote workforces with connectivity and little friction. Today, as many of our customers begin to adapt to new hybrid work models, the story still rings true: the flexibility and security of a managed SD-WAN is critical.

In another customer example, World Fuel Services, a Fortune 500 energy company, had already launched their company-wide digital transformation initiative to transition to a cloud-based end-to-end architecture when the global pandemic hit. World Fuel Service’s primarily on-site organization became fully remote, but the company’s traditional VPN was slow and unreliable. After deploying Aryaka Private Access, latency decreased by 27.5% and remote workers noted the positive experience of having fast, uninterrupted connectivity at home. Though the company plans to eventually reopen offices, they anticipate embracing a hybrid work model going forward and recognizes Aryaka as a critical enabler to that vision.

Aryaka’s managed SD-WAN solution enables our customers to be flexible, adapt to the needs of the business and embrace the future of work.

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The world demands food in various forms. Sustainable agriculture is the way to get it. UPL Limited, formerly United Phosphorous, has made it their mission to be a premier global provider of total crop solutions designed to secure the world’s long-term food supply.

What began as an entrepreneurial initiative by their chairman Mr. Rajju Shroff more than 50 years ago in India, with what would be a little over $5000 in invested capital today, has flourished into a global corporate with over $5B in revenues and operations spanning over 138 countries!

I sat down to have a conversation with Balaji Aravamuthan, the Global CIO of UPL.  Based out of Mumbai, the financial and film capital of India, Balaji and his team had navigated the company to adopt a hybrid workplace environment to navigate the ramifications of the pandemic. Our conversation focused on the “Gen Z” workforce entering into the corporate during these uncertain times.

With his experience, it is no surprise that Balaji would be a mentor to many. However, he also came across as a lifelong student himself with a penchant for continual learning. Technologist, Student, Mentor and Philosopher -that perhaps summed up Balaji.

You may listen to the podcast here:

https://www.aryaka.com/podcasts/student-never-bored/

Here are some top takeaways from the conversation with Balaji –

1. “Gen Zs” and the Gig workers are causing an “Expectation shift” in the Enterprise

The new workforce is knowledgeable, highly demanding, inquisitive, and perhaps even attention deficit in their work ethic. They also thrive on digital experiences. They are not attuned to a 9-5 workplace environment, with a punch-in, clock-out mentality. Gig workers and freelancers are also proliferating the workplace blurring the boundaries and creating a diverse workplace environment in large companies with the pre-millennials, the millennials, and the Gen Ys. How should an organization give them purpose, motivate them and make them productive while being in tune with their experiential needs?

2. Uberization of the Enterprise is around the corner

Traditional enterprise organizations have typically owned the entire value chain with their intellectual property and workforce with a significant portion of them being employees or consultants. However, if we look at a platform like Uber, they don’t typically own the cards nor are the drivers their employees. The pandemic caused a rapid re-think of the need for employees to be in the office and fueled hybrid workplace environments. The next logical step would be to create a dynamic environment where it would not just be the employee being anywhere, but rather anyone being an at-will worker, who is productive when they want to, and has a dynamic interface with the organization with different tiers of engagement and incentives.

3. Consumerization of the workplace drives a greater need for data privacy and protection

The Gen Zs are used to sharing of their life on social media.  That mindset needs to shift in the sensitive environments. At the same time, the workplace needs to accommodate the cultural shifts required by making it easier to ensure data privacy and protection. Governments are bringing in privacy-driven compliance requirements globally. CIOs and leaders across the company need to co-opt that and ensure that the right technology components are adopted to ensure strict data privacy, while at the same time fostering an inclusive environment.

4. Hybrid workplaces will drive the need for rapid flexibility

For UPL, the pandemic caused an explosion of their “office” footprint. Their 40 manufacturing locations and about 130 offices worldwide suddenly became 20,000 offices as employees were forced to work from home. Capacity planning, security, collaboration requirements – all had to be rethought rapidly to ensure the employees were productive. While the organization adopted a safety-first norm towards its employees, UPL was categorized as an essential business by the government and had to maintain organizational productivity and efficiency in the greater national interest. This was a tough balancing act, but the team was able to build the flexibility to create the hybrid environment. Static capacity planning is a thing of the past, as organizations will need to be more dynamic and flexible – “capacity on-demand” is the key, whether it be networks, security or any other infrastructure element.

5. Technology should enable human relationships, not isolate them into individuals

Mobile phones have caused humans to isolate themselves, glued to their phones, and perhaps unable to develop healthy relationships. The Gen Zs are particularly susceptible to social media relationships rather than social relationships. Balaji made a point about humans being social animals, who have become social media animals. While he is a technologist to the core, he also feels passionately that there needs to be a conscious effort to making technology work to foster human relationships at a deeper level and not be a substitute for it. The organizational leadership should recognize this and put the right cultural ethos in place to ensure that technology is an enabler and not a divisor.

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We are launching two promotional offers to address the growth in multi-cloud adoption and hybrid Workplace needs for flexible bandwidth allocation and security. All part of our highly recommended managed Network and Security as-a-Service.

Terms and Conditions apply. Find out more by contacting us or email us at info@aryaka.com.

Hybrid Workplace and Multi-Cloud Adoption

Last year, enterprises and employees anywhere experienced the greatest workplace migration – ever.

CEO opinions on when their employees return to the office or keep working from home are as many as remote access solutions, or cloud providers. There is no ‘one size fits all’ answer. Common among enterprises is that most, if not all, are looking for help not just with features of products but in solving the bigger problems: operational efficiency, time-to-market and issue resolution, ease of deployment, and the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their network and security solutions. Conversations have shifted from enabling employees to work from home as quickly as possible to strategic decisions for an IT and network architecture that will serve customers this year and setting them up for the future.

CIOs face challenges to deliver flexibility and enable the Hybrid Workplace

Networking Priorities Digital Transformation – and with it the use of more cloud resources – coupled with a strong focus on supporting the hybrid workplace, remote worker enablement and remote worker security, while managing OPEX, are top of mind	Bandwidth Reallocation In light of Work-From-Home initiatives, roughly 2/3 of surveyed enterprises consider it very important to be able to dynamically reallocate bandwidth and connectivity from on-prem to the home

Multi-Cloud adoption and spend on the rise

Another recent report, the State of the Cloud by Flexera, showed that one in three enterprises spend more than $12m a year on the public cloud and “92 percent of respondents reported having a multi-cloud strategy” and “optimizing spend is top cloud initiative for the fifth year running.” You can download a copy of Flexera’s State of the Cloud 2021 here.

Aryaka’s Managed Network and Security as-a-Service is trusted by hundreds of customers worldwide and comes with high recommendation as the recent blogs by my colleagues Dave Ginsburg and Jill Sweeney highlight. Check out our reviews on Gartner Peer Insights and TechValidate.

The pandemic has been hard on all of us.

But for your networking needs, you have an easy button with Aryaka.

Learn more about our SmartServices

Aryaka SmartSecure Private Access | Hybrid Workplace Solution
Aryaka SmartCloud | Managed Multi-Cloud Networking as-a-Service

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We have to admit to suffering from chronic pandemic fatigue – both when it comes to the limitations it imposes into our everyday life as well as when it comes to the entire high-tech industry linking every piece of technology news to the IT challenges posed by the COVID-19 challenge. Clearly the dramatic shift of traffic load from intra-enterprise to employees’ homes and cloud services has had a gigantic impact.

But the limitations of traditional VPN infrastructures -which funnel all traffic to the enterprise core infrastructure assuming it is still the center of all things- were in evidence much earlier, as we discussed on our recent webinar. Even now we persist in labelling knowledge workers that are not in an office a “remote or mobile worker” as if that was a special exception status. But no: Even before pandemic, when working in a global workforce, time zone differences dictated that several participants in a meeting located in a different geography would be attending the meeting from home. I certainly must go back quite a few years to remember the last time I stayed in the office until 10pm or had to be in the office at 5am to attend a meeting. I’d do it on counted occasions for key meetings, I remember. However, ever since technology enabled me to attend those meetings easily and effectively from my home office, they have become very regular occurrences.

And even back then, we all probably recall situations when technology failed to connect one of those participants effectively. Bad voice quality will render any participant’s attendance anywhere from less impactful to a total loss of their (and sometimes the attendees’) time.

Fast forward to the last year, and the situation became so bad that enterprises had to tell employees to not use video or to stagger meetings outside of the rush full- or half- meeting hours while they were trying to find a solution to remote traffic overload.

The initial solution was to pivot towards 100% cloud-oriented solutions. But even those faced performance issues with exponentially growing and sometimes unpredictable traffic growth. Cloud providers must face a basic issue with their capacity planning: is the current demand permanent? If -let’s say- we turn back to the old traffic patterns (which admittedly is very unlikely), then they are left with footing a bill for over-capacity without the revenue to justify it. Cloud architectures allow for a lot of elasticity, but dramatically decreased demand is a problem when we typically architect for “up and to the right” demand models.

Aryaka’s Private Access addresses the realities of hybrid cloud and enterprise infrastructures, which naturally ideally accommodate the needs of the emerging hybrid workplace, the new reality where a very large percentage of workers are going to be both office- and home-based. The ability to re-use the same high-performance global infrastructure -in Aryaka’s case the Global Layer 2 SmartConnect network- for enterprise, cloud and remote worker traffic delivers on three key advantages for Aryaka customers:

1. Performance: Enterprises can leverage both the deterministic performance of the Aryaka Core network as a global middle mile as well as traffic optimization algorithms between end points and the closest Aryaka Service PoP. This means superior and predictable performance for any remote office, remote worker and application, resulting in increased productivity. Real world tests have measured performance improvements of over 400% (!).
2. Elasticity: Having the flexibility to re-use the same global infrastructure for both intra-enterprise traffic and remote worker traffic without the bottlenecks of traditional VPN solutions allows enterprises to invest into a single resource pool to achieve optimal performance across the board. Shifts in traffic load from enterprise-internal to remote workers will be completely transparent and user experience as well as application performance will remain intact and consistent.
3. Ease of Deployment: Like every other service in the Aryaka SmartSecure portfolio, SmartSecure Private Access will be up and running globally in 48 hours or less, with Aryaka’s industry leading 365/24/7 service. Furthermore, the managed service model abstracts implementation and trouble-shooting complexity for customers. Which, combined with the ability to leverage converged core network infrastructure and services, leads to immediate TCO savings: it eliminates implementation and operational silos for separate enterprise network and remote worker access infrastructures.

All this is made possible by leveraging the Aryaka SmartServices cloud-first architecture for service delivery. The elements of the SmartSecure Private Access solution encompass:

1. The SmartSecure Private Access Client on the user device, which supports all major operating systems (Win, macOS, iOS, Android). Administrators can also very easily set up split-tunneling policies. Last but not least, the client has the ability to tunnel through access technologies that try to suppress encrypted VPN traffic.
2. The clients’ traffic is terminated on an Aryaka Service PoP, which spins up as many SmartSecure Private Access Instances as required to support resource separation between Aryaka customers as well as deterministic performance. From here, user traffic traverses through the Aryaka Global L2 Private Network to either a cloud service via the SmartCloud service, or to a DC/HQ or branch location via the SmartConnect service, leveraging the superior performance features of the Aryaka core.
3. The SmartSecure Private Access Manager service supports easy operation of the service and interacts with existing enterprise identity and access management systems such as LDAP, Kerberos, Radius and others to reliably authenticate users and establish their access rights.

Aryaka SmartConnect Private Access exemplifies Aryaka’s commitment to cater to its customers’ needs: its design was shaped by the input of hundreds’ of Aryaka customers around the world. They expressed their desire to extend the benefits of Aryaka’s SmartServices portfolio to address the challenge of the hybrid workplace, and our teams listened and delivered the agility of the DevOps model we use in service delivery (which deserves its own blog in the near feature).

If you want to learn more about SmartSecure Private Access, please download the Data Sheet or -even better- request a demo.

The post Aryaka SmartSecure Private Access: A Look Behind the Scenes appeared first on Aryaka.

The Brave New Workplace

The workplace is fast evolving. The onset of Covid-19 rapidly accelerated the evolution of the workplace for enterprises in a manner that, in normal times, would almost be construed as disruptive.

Enterprise CIOs have adapted remarkably in getting large swaths of the employee workforce into remote working environments, while the traditional office spaces are largely empty. Employees have also adapted to working from their home environments, and others have moved outside of their home base to be closer to their families or work from cities that are less expensive. Now they are literally accessing corporate applications from anywhere & everywhere.

For CIOs this has given birth to the concept of the “Anywhere” worker.

The mandate for most CIOs, as they look at long term architectural underpinnings, is to have these “Anywhre” workers be treated as first-class citizens in terms access to corporate applications, and to ensure they have secure connectivity and highly predictable application performance in much the same way as a worker in the traditional office.

The Renewed Focus on Productivity

Previously, home working and teleworking was allowed with the focus on flexibility. This thinking was okay when it was a smaller portion of workers working remote (less than 20% of the workforce). However, with large swaths of the population now working remote, CIOs have to consider the impact on productivity as well. This has a direct co-relation to business efficiency.

While the shift back to traditional office environments will come about, CIOs are really focused on a model that allows them to have a workforce that is highly productive regardless of whether they are in an on-premises office environment or working remotely. The location should NOT matter for productivity and consistent access to corporate applications.

Traditional Architectures Are Complicated

While remote access solutions have been around for ages, the traditional architectures are challenged to deliver against the new model. And while clients have been able to connect to on-premises aggregators or cloud-based ones, many organizations have had to set up parallel WAN infrastructures for remote access and private networking. The operational complexity of managing them in a consistent manner have also been challenging, and it has always been a complex undertaking to provide predictable application access in a secure manner to remote workers.

These were acknowledged problems, but since they affected a smaller portion of the workforce, CIOs and IT organizations managed them on a best effort basis and in many cases, threw more bandwidth at the problem and subsidized internet connectivity for employees working remote.

To be able to offer a flexible architecture that accommodates the notion of users and applications being anywhere, with a consistent security posture, and delivered as-a-service, is something in line with what many CIOs are actively exploring. Either/or architectures are good to get things going quickly but become operationally complex to sustain in the long run.

The Aryaka Approach for Hybrid Workplaces

This is where the Aryaka solution makes a difference. Built on the principles of the Cloud-First WAN, it offers the right elements of the network as-a-service for managed SD-WAN as well as Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architectural requirements.

• First off, it is fully managed. CIOs and their organizations can consider it their “Easy button.” It is very simple to do adds, moves and changes. The architectural flexibility with Aryaka’s Cloud First WANs allows organizations to blur the boundaries between sites and users, on-premises and cloud deployments as well as network and network security, all delivered as-a-service.
• Next, the clients themselves terminate on the PoPs and leverage the service intelligence in the Aryaka global points of presence, giving them the ability to connect from “anywhere,”, but also able to leverage the built-in WAN optimization in the PoPs that provide highly predictable application performance
• Finally, the convergence of network and network security delivered as-as-service really drives simplification and lowers the total cost of ownership.

The combination of all the above make it easier for network and security teams to help drive the adoption of hybrid workplaces with minimal disruption to their business workflow, while maximizing productivity for “Anywhere” workers and partners.

We are seeing tremendous traction with the integration of Check Point software as well as Palo Alto firewalls on our service edge notes – the ANAPs – as virtualized functions that are both hosted and managed. These are already driving consolidation of the network and security functions at the edge and helping lower TCO. The Aryaka Service PoPs serve as control points in all these instances with the rich service intelligence constructs built into them.

These now get extended with the private access offering. The Aryaka SmartSecure offering and the principles of the Cloud-First WAN are purpose built to address the needs of SD-WAN and SASE architectures, at scale, in a consistent manner globally!

Building Blocks for the Next-Gen Managed SD-WAN and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)

At a fundamental level, SASE, as defined by Gartner, is defining the convergence of network-as-a-service with network security-as-a-service. It is a Cloud-First architecture focusing on service delivery model that embraces both site centric and user-centric requirements.

The Aryaka Cloud-First WAN is a powerful way for enterprises to future proof their network and security architectures for the next generation of SD-WAN and SASE architectural build outs.  CIOs, Network and Security professionals, as well as Cloud architects can take confidence in this being an excellent choice for their organization if they are interested in taking advantage of a fully managed, integrated offering.

Eventually, the goal of such architectures is to provide the maximum flexibility for organizations to allow their businesses to manage change better, with minimal disruption and with a high degree of agility. CIOs are change agents today, mandated with transformation initiatives that propel their organizations faster with reduced risk. WAN transformation and security in that context are vital underpinnings to get right in that context.

All these solutions are a means to an end meant to make employees more productive, collaborative and to help drive greater engagement and adoption of a company’s offerings with its partners and customers.

Employees make an organization and today this organization is evolving. As more organizations get attuned to the idea of thinking about work as not a place, but rather an activity, it will have a more profound impact on the architectures that really are geared to drive this change.

The new offering from Aryaka allows such organizations to take a confident step in that direction.

Press Release: Aryaka Announces the Industry’s Most Flexible VPN for Hybrid Workplaces and the “Anywhere” worker.

Webinar: Re-Defining VPN Services in the Cloud-First Era: Click here to register: https://www.aryaka.com/events-webinars/re-defining-vpn-with-sase-sd-wan/

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With nearly every business-critical application and resource migrating to the cloud, legacy wide area networks are straining to support rapidly evolving corporate requirements. IT has been trying to accommodate using a mix of disparate point solutions that add complexity to the WAN and don’t scale very well.

The result lead to a series of integration headaches that IT is forced to manage. Global enterprises need to find a more efficient way to streamline and simplify their digital transformation strategy, given these converging developments:

• Digital transformation efforts are ramping up the value of data. Companies expect these initiatives to do everything from improve customer service, increase revenue and reduce costs, and also help differentiate them from competitors. The WAN is critical to success now more than ever.
• Global enterprises are placing more resources in the cloud. The necessary and inescapable march to the cloud promises to make organizations more nimble, but also requires IT to ensure employees can reliably and securely access these corporate resources over the WAN from everywhere.
• The workforce is increasingly global. Design and engineering teams are often scattered around the world, and organizations are turning to tools such as AWS, Zoom, and Microsoft SharePoint to enable them to collaborate, but performance is often spotty. And today, these collaboration sessions are central to getting work done.

The problem is, WAN standards (IP VPN, MPLS, Internet-based SD-WAN) have not evolved fast enough as a “whole” to keep up with the emerging requirements:

• Enablement of Global Workforce
• Cloud/SaaS
• Universal Application Performance
• Workforce Collaboration
• Enterprise Transformations

The emerging requirements for digital transformation demands an exit from integrating legacy technology silos and transitioning to an fully managed SD-WAN as a service for simplified network connectivity and application delivery.

Deploying a global enterprise WAN with Aryaka can be done in hours.  All you need is local Internet connectivity to one of our 30 global points of presence.  From there, your enterprise traffic is optimized for transport across a global, secure, private network to your data center or the cloud/SaaS supplier of your choice.

Aryaka uses dedicated transport from Tier 1 Service Providers worldwide, and our POPs are within 30ms of 95% of the knowledge workers around the world. With more than 800 customers and 7,000+ sites on our Layer 2 global private network, we are a proven solution with one of the highest customer retention rates in the industry.

Deployed by over 800 Enterprises Around the World
Aryaka’s global SD-WAN has been deployed in some of the largest enterprises in the world, covering 63 countries. Businesses use Aryaka as the go-to network to improve their global connectivity and application performance, especially with branch offices across remote geographies.

• Consumer electronics giant, Skullcandy, replaced their MPLS connection with Aryaka. They saw the performance of their cloud-based ERP, SAP Business ByDesign, improve up to 10x for their global offices.
• JAS Forwarding Worldwide, a global logistics corporation, implemented Aryaka for their 240 offices worldwide to connect to their SaaS application, CargoWise One. Their employees around the world were now able to collaborate in real-time.
• Makino, a global leader in manufacturing and machine technology, replaced their legacy network with Aryaka to transfer massive amounts of data from their headquarters to regional branch offices. Using Aryaka’s SmartCONNECT SD-WAN as a Service, Makino saw data transfer time from Japan to the U.S. reduced from 6-7 hours down to 20 minutes.

The Solution Worldwide Digital Transformation
CIOs initiating digital transformation strategies and more applications migrate from the data center to the cloud, Aryaka has the solution designed for modern enterprise requirements, helping IT departments around the world sleep easy.

We invite you to speak with us or our customers on how Aryaka’s SD-WAN as a Service can help you address global connectivity needs. Contact us today and see how we can resolve your digital transformation needs today.

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Optimizing Application Performance over VPN

Remote access has, historically, been a nightmare for enterprise end users and IT teams, especially in global deployments. Support tickets over connection complaints are a regular occurrence, as remote users attempt to access their mission- and business-critical applications and information, and shadow IT grows as mobile users attempt to circumvent connectivity issues to maintain productivity.

While the SD-WAN market “remains hot,” per 451, solutions at the edge are only a small part of a working application acceleration solution sought by tier one service providers and enterprises alike. The public Internet remains a poor substitute for an enterprise-grade private network, as it is prone to latency, packet loss, and jitter – especially in global deployments, where information must travel across continents and oceans.

MPLS providers attempt to cobble together a working solution by combining disparate pieces – SD-WAN from one vendor, WAN Optimization from another – but so far have not implemented a working solution that noticeably improves application performance for end users, while taking the strain off of IT teams.

Enter SmartACCESS

With a crowded playing field, where potential competitors are still scrambling to find solutions that address remote access and VPN application performance, the IT networking space has yet to find a solution that fully solves enterprise pain points. According to 451, Aryaka’s solution addresses the issues that “enterprises and telcos alike face in trying to stitch together a global high-performance, low-cost cloud network,” while remaining “well differentiated from other SD-WAN vendors.”

Aryaka’s SmartACCESS is clientless, meaning that there is no additional software needed. This allows IT to maintain their existing security policies. It utilizes SD-WAN and WAN-Optimization, as well as dynamic CDN, to improve application performance – but it does so over a purpose-built, enterprise-grade global private network, with POPs located within 30ms of 95% of the world’s business users. This way, end users access their information via the cloud while retaining the performance of a private network.

451’s report dives into the current market landscape and discusses how Aryaka can save enterprises money while improving their remote access performance. Read the full report here.

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