In a recent customer survey conducted in partnership with third-party research firm TechValidate, we sought to get a deeper understanding of our customers – why they first selected Aryaka and how, as these organizations continue to grow, change and meet new challenges, they continue to find value in Aryaka.

First, it’s no surprise that the top reasons global organizations select Aryaka as their managed SD-WAN as-a-Service partner is to solve their application performance challenges (49%), provide reliable, stable connectivity to China (47%) and as a way to reduce costs through either the replacement or augmentation of existing MPLS networks (45%).

But the reasons Aryaka customers stay is a slightly different story: it’s ultimately about time savings, flexibility and reliability. After deploying Aryaka solutions, 63% of all surveyed customers report time savings as a major benefit and that number increases to over 70% for large enterprises. Over half respondents estimate they save between 10-25% in (wo)man hours after deploying Aryaka, while nearly 20% estimate saving up to 50% of their time. As one respondent, a Director of Infrastructure at an S&P 500 Electronics company, explains, “Aside from the technical benefits, Aryaka’s ability to monitor our network health and work directly with our ISP providers has significantly reduced the amount of time we spend on troubleshooting ISP-related issues.”

But what does this time savings actually mean for IT organizations?

For some, it means removing an operational burden that otherwise may not be managed well and could negatively impact the end-user experience. One respondent, a Director of IT at a small business computer software company, notes in the survey, “Without Aryaka’s Last Mile Management service, we would be struggling to manage and care for the various circuits we have in our global locations with our limited resources.”

For other enterprises, it provides an opportunity to refocus energies on other high priority projects and evolve the IT organization into a partner to the business. As Mark Baker, CTO of Pilot Freight Services, puts it, “When we talk about evolving IT departments where they become business partners and having the technology to enable that – that’s really the position that Aryaka gives an IT organization.”

Then there’s the flexibility provided by a global managed SD-WAN solution. Dynamic businesses need dynamic networks to support them – for both the planned and the unplanned.

Thirty-four percent of respondents noted that quicker deployments and the ability to set up new sites efficiently is a key benefit of Aryaka and that number increases to 52% for respondents who displaced their legacy MPLS networks with Aryaka. As Eric Jones, IT Infrastructure Manager at CallisonRTKL, describes, “Deploying Aryaka services in a new location is quick and easy. You can be up and running in hours without the need for onsite technical staff.”

The ability to easily and efficiently add new sites isn’t just invaluable to growing companies, but also to organizations experiencing growth through mergers and acquisitions, a common use case among Aryaka customers (see here, here and here). It’s no secret that acquisitions pose a unique set of challenges in unifying products, company cultures and existing IT and infrastructure. Enabling organizations to quickly and easily unify their IT networks not only saves time and money for the IT department, but also saves times and boosts productivity for end-users.

This flexibility has also been critical throughout the last year in supporting Aryaka customers through the unprecedented challenges created by the global pandemic. Nearly half of surveyed customers responded that the ability to adjust bandwidth across sites with ease has been the biggest benefit during COVID-19, while 43% cited the ability to better support a surge of remote users. Similarly, 25% noted the ability to enable a hybrid workplace, our “new normal,” which experts agree will likely continue long after the pandemic is over.

Additionally, reliability – both from a network performance and customer support perspective – is critical. For an IT organization, the end-user is their customer. So when end-users are happy and productive, the IT organization can rest easy. Over half of our surveyed customers cite stable, reliable connectivity for global end-users and faster application performance as the two biggest benefits of Aryaka.

Patrick Thompson, CIO of Albemarle, shares that the improved the global performance of Microsoft suite not only reduced costs by cutting down travel and eliminating expensive videoconferencing equipment, but also increased company productivity: “We rolled out 365, Skype and Teams across the world and it really helped us change the way we work across the world. Less travel [and]… Aryaka provided the level of performance we were looking for with 1% less jitter and less than 1% drop rates.”

As another respondent to our survey, Ben Warner, IT Manager at Henny Penny, succinctly puts it, “Aryaka increased the reliability, stability and performance of our connectivity to China, allowing for a better experience for our end-users and IT administrators.”

Lastly, a whopping 76% of surveyed customers responded that their network TCO decreased after deploying Aryaka. While over 30% of customers cited decreased hardware costs, decreased software costs and/or decreased transport costs, nearly half of all customers cited decreased time spent on incident resolution, again emphasizing how a managed SD-WAN solution like Aryaka can free up IT organizations from the tedious tasks and operational burdens of managing a network to focus on other priorities.

Whether it is global application performance challenges, connectivity to China issues or lack of a unified global network, many Aryaka customers select us because we help them solve those critical challenges. What our survey ultimately helped us understand, however, was that Aryaka customers remain our customers because we partner with them beyond these initial use cases. As their organizations grow and change, we continue to provide an invaluable partnership that helps our customers meet the new business demands of today and plan for the future.

Stay tuned for additional information on this survey and more informative surveys to come.

Editor’s Note: Though all surveyed respondents are verified customers, only some quotes are named as respondents had the option to provide anonymous feedback.

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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.

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Source: NCTA – The Internet & Television Association

According to NCTA – The Internet & Television Association, Internet speeds have gone up from 50 Mbps in 2009 to over 2 Gbps in 2019. Considerable improvements in the available bandwidth at the first and last mile internet has prompted enterprises to deploy this technology. Many bandwidth-hungry applications like file transfer and others benefit from the available bandwidth. Still, apps like VoIP and Video that are sensitive to delays and latency have a tough time coping with Internet transport. It is common for UCaaS applications to experience dropped calls and bad call quality. Deploying a last-mile MPLS circuit to carry UCaaS traffic is expensive. In most cases, the far-flung location of a branch office means MPLS is not even available as an option.

Aryaka’s link assurance provides first and last mile internet solutions. Path Replication, Adaptive Loss Recovery and Load Balancing are the features that help us achieve this goal.

Path Replication

Enabling the Path Replication policy can be considered as a loss recovery mechanism. Path Replication allows customers’ selected traffic to be replicated over the primary and secondary links. If one of the links experience loss, the second link delivers the same packet to the peer. Enabling Path Replication delivers duplicate packets between peers. The remote peer consolidates duplicate packets. Path Replication can be applied to any kind of QoS traffic.

In the image above, the HQ is connected to the Aryaka PoP over Internet links from two different ISPs. Packets are replicated on both ISP links. At the PoP the packets are reassembled by combining both links, thus ensuring that any performance degradation or packet loss in one ISP does not effect the connectivity, especially in the last mile connection.

Adaptive Loss Recovery

Adaptive Path Loss Recovery is a feedback mechanism that selectively retransmits lost packets on a link. This is implemented using a patented lightweight TCP-like algorithm to recover from packet loss. When the receiver, in this case, the Aryaka PoP or ANAP, doesn’t receive a packet, it initiates a Negative ACK, requesting the peer to retransmit the lost packet. Hence, the amount of bandwidth required only needs to be proportional to the loss percentages over the links.

Load Balancing

Load Balancing allows customers to take advantage of both paths, primary and secondary, by sending alternating packets down alternate paths. The traffic is distributed across the links on a per-packet basis in a round robin manner, resulting in very efficient resource utilization.

UCaaS – Deriving the most benefit

Though these features improve the performance of an entire gamut of cloud applications, the ones that benefit the most are UCaaS applications. Voice and video are very susceptible to latency and delays. Besides, any disruption to the link results in dropped calls; re-establishing the call takes a few minutes if not seconds. This delay affects the user experience and perception of quality.

Watch the below video to see how Aryaka overcomes the last mile internet limitations and see these features in action and compare the performance of video streaming with and without these features.

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‘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.

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While internet performance has steadily improved in many regions, many enterprises still shy away from entirely replacing their MPLS WAN infrastructures with more cost-efficient internet links. Internet is then most often just used to offload non-critical applications to save MPLS bandwidth for business-critical traffic that benefits from deterministic QoS and/or the perceived security advantage of MPLS.

Several factors are coming together that make that seemingly safe choice for MPLS continuity something that needs to be considered under new parameters:

• The mass migration to the cloud has rendered the traditional branch to HQ/DC backhaul architecture obsolete, since this may well result in very poor user experience (learn more about here).
• In global deployments, service providers seldom guarantee SLAs beyond their administrative domain, rendering the expectation of superior MPLS QoS performance questionable – and making a case for a global L2 core network architecture with complete control of the latency, jitter and packet loss at a global scale.
• With innovative technology, last-mile internet connectivity to the branch can perform as well as MPLS links – at a fraction of the cost.

In this blog, we’ll focus on Aryaka’s last-mile Management Solutions, the secret sauce that delivers on MPLS-like performance at internet-access cost in the Aryaka architecture. SmartLINK is one of the key reasons why many of Aryaka’s 800 customers have decided to abandon MPLS altogether.

SmartLINK operates on the last-mile internet links that connect the ANAP SD-Branch appliance to the Aryaka PoP that provides the closest entry point into Aryaka’s global L2 core network (which guarantees completely deterministic QoS SLAs to any global destination). Aryaka’s PoPs are distributed in a way that covers 95% of the world’s knowledge workers population with internet access latency of less than 30ms.

SmartLINK consists of several technologies that -when combined- minimize latency and eliminate jitter and packet loss over last-mile internet connections, which typically consist of redundant internet links provided by different ISPs. The main key technologies -be aware there are more- in SmartLINK are:

Path Selection: The Path Selection policy selects the optimal link for customers’ business-critical traffic. Path Selection actively monitors each path for packet loss and latency and selects the link with the best performance. This helps to ensure that Aryaka doesn’t send the traffic through a path that is having heavy packet loss or experiencing high latency, which eventually deteriorates network performance as well as user experience. Loss and latency thresholds can be defined to trigger path selection.

Load Balancing: Load Balancing allows customers to take advantage of both paths, primary and secondary, by sending alternating packets down alternate paths. The traffic is distributed across the links on a per-packet basis in a round robin manner, resulting in very efficient resource utilization.

Path Replication: Enabling the Path Replication policy can be considered as a loss recovery mechanism. Path replication allows customers’ selected traffic to be replicated over the primary and secondary links. If one of the links experience loss, the second link delivers the same packet to the peer. Enabling Path replication delivers duplicate packets between peers. The remote peer consolidates duplicate packets. Path Replication can be applied to any kind of QOS traffic

Timed Replay: When enabled, each (or a single) link automatically re-sends packets after a timed delay. This ensures the packets are received in case of loss/or no loss and causes twice as many packets to be sent per path. “Timed Replay” causes the customer’s usable SBW to be half of what he or she subscribed to. Timed Replay can only be applied with Path Selection and Load Balancing. Applying Timed Replay to Path Replication is not recommended. Timed Replay is better suited for UDP traffic, such as VoIP and video traffic.

Path Loss Adaptive Recovery: Adaptive Path Loss Recovery is a feedback mechanism that selectively retransmits lost packets on a link. This is implemented using a patented lightweight TCP-like algorithm to recover from packet loss. When the receiver, in this case, the Aryaka POP or ANAP, doesn’t receive a packet, it initiates a Negative ACK, requesting the peer to retransmit the lost packet. Hence, the amount of bandwidth required only needs to be proportional to the loss percentages over the links.

The result of applying these technologies with SmartLINK turns redundant internet connectivity into a medium that delivers on optimal, deterministic performance and provides a cost alternative to MPLS without sacrificing QoS.

Want to see a demo of SmartLINK? Book a demo here.

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60 billion dollars. That is how much enterprises spend (waste?) on network operations. In a study McKinsey conducted in 2017, it was concluded that a lot of that cost is caused by many time-intensive, manual tasks involved in networking operations: configuration, trouble-shooting, link procurement and many more. Let’s also remind ourselves that in computing, none too long ago, the same pattern existed as enterprises planned, configured and maintained their very own server farms. What changed it all in computing? The appearance of X-as-a-Service delivery models – it allowed companies to focus on the IT aspect of computing that is most relevant to the business (application delivery) and to stop constructing server farms.

Aryaka pioneers the SD-WAN-as-a-Service model, enabling enterprises to focus on the business-relevant elements of networking (providing an agile, global, secure communications infrastructure) and to stop being distracted by manual configuration and trouble-shooting of the multitude that appliances that characterize the average enterprises’ communication infrastructure. And now, Aryaka can also simplify the task of procuring, monitoring and managing last mile connectivity.

Last Mile Procurement and Management

Monitoring and managing the last mile has always been integral to the Aryaka solution: through the MyAryaka portal, customers can always gain end-to-end visibility into the performance of every element and every application in their network, ranging from the SmartCONNECTcore network connectivity service to the status and performance of the last mile.

As Aryaka has gained experience with the performance of hundreds of service providers providing last mile connectivity as an onramp to the Aryaka Core Network, it makes perfect sense to offer Last Mile procurement services. It addresses a key pain point for many enterprises as they transform their WANs:

• Why waste so much time exploring, negotiating and managing connectivity to hundreds or even thousands of global branches?
• How can enterprises establish which service provider offers the best possible connectivity in a certain location other than through extensive site-by-site research?
• Why not simply leverage Aryaka’s expertise and experience when it comes to last mile internet connectivity?

Aryaka has helped over 800 enterprise customers to accelerate their WAN transformation and reap the benefits. A good example is Makino (read the case study).

In addition to procurement, Aryaka also offers last mile monitoring and management, optimizing the ongoing performance of last mile internet links. Last mile monitoring includes Aryaka’s patented SmartLINK technology, which constantly measures link performance and implements a variety of technologies to optimize link performance. SmartLINK immediately detects link degradation and overcomes it by providing performance routing over a preferred link (where link redundancy has been implemented), packet duplication and/or load sharing, among other options. As previously mentioned, complete end-to-end visibility into every aspect of the network -ranging all the way from physical connectivity through the global core network up to application and cloud performance- is at the core of the Aryaka network service, eliminating the siloed underlay-overlay visibility that continues to plague most SD-WAN solutions.

MyAryaka: SmartLINK health view

In a nutshell: Aryaka has been pioneering the as-a-Service model for networking for nearly 10 years, allowing its customers to enjoy the same benefits for their network infrastructure that they have experienced by adopting XaaS for computing, too. No manual configuration, true intent-based networking – and now, Last Mile procurement and management.

Read more on Aryaka’s Last Mile procurement services here.

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