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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Skype for Business with a Legacy Network

Skype for Business with a Global SD-WAN

Skype for Business lets you collaborate with anyone, anywhere, on any device, with the security and control of Microsoft. But, when WANs cause poor voice quality and frequent disconnects, there are some things you won’t be able to do with Skype for Business, including…

• Connecting with co-workers and partners through IM, voice, or video calls
• Seeing when your contacts are available online, in a meeting, or presenting
• Broadcasting online to a large audience
• Sharing your screen in meetings

The Heavy Burden on Connectivity
Skype for Business places a huge demand on networks. As more users take advantage of the benefits, that demand increases exponentially. Here’s what you can expect when Skype for Business travels over the public Internet:

• Congestion causing packets to drop
• Latency and jitter resulting in low quality voice and video
• Skype for Business overtaken by non-critical applications
• Bandwidth becoming insufficient

All of these conditions adversely affect collaboration, and ultimately business execution.

A Skype Solution for Global Enterprises
A leading offshore construction and support services provider for oil and gas field development experienced these problems first hand with their offices in Singapore and Mumbai. The company relied on Skype for Business across its globally distributed offices for collaboration. They needed flawless application performance, as Skype for Business had a direct impact on employee productivity and their business operations.

Unfortunately, the company experienced ongoing problems caused by their IP-VPN. Their public Internet links caused performance degradation on all of their applications. This was triggered by the Internet’s inherent high packet loss and fluctuating latencies (between 270ms and 300ms). A common problem with the public Internet is jitter that is caused by erratic packet delay in the network. For reliable connectivity, Skype for Business needs a consistent network path and low jitter.

Because of these network problems, voice and video quality suffered, and connection drops with Skype for Business became common, causing serious collaboration issues between employees in Singapore and Mumbai.

MPLS as an alternative wasn’t the answer. They realized that the high costs and months long deployments would be a detriment to their business. Instead, the company replaced its public Internet links with Aryaka’s SmartConnect network and SD-WAN service to improve Skype for Business reliability and performance.

Deployment of the company’s applications to Aryaka SmartConnect only took a few days, and they quickly saw the benefits. Skype for Business had zero disconnects. Performance was significantly improved — with up to 28 times faster connection setups. Application stability also improved. To get the best user experience using Skype for Business, latency should be under 200 milliseconds. With Aryaka’s network, latency was lowered from 270ms-300ms, to just 70ms between Singapore and Mumbai.

Aryaka Supports Microsoft ExpressRoute
Microsoft’s Azure ExpressRoute enhances connectivity to Microsoft cloud services. It enables enterprises to extend their networks into the Microsoft cloud over a dedicated private connection.

Aryaka has partnered with Microsoft, and supports ExpressRoute connections through its global private network and managed global SD-WAN service. Office 365 and Skype for Business users gain greater reliability, faster speeds, lower latencies, and higher security, because ExpressRoute connections run over Aryaka’s private network.

Global Network Connectivity Built for the Cloud
Aryaka bypasses the public Internet through its global private network (using an SDN/NFV framework). This delivers consistent latencies and negligible packet loss to provide predictable Skype for Business performance.

When branch offices need cloud access and VPN connectivity, Aryaka enables dynamic path selection, load balancing, and converged WAN-edge functionality. We also include routing and optimization, all within a single customer premises equipment (CPE).

To ensure reliable Skype for Business connectivity, embedded Quality of Service (QoS) prioritizes traffic types across five levels and multiple sub-classes using application type, and pre-set service levels. This limits bandwidth “hogging” by non-critical traffic, enabling efficient and reliable voice, video, and real-time traffic. WAN optimization is also embedded into our global private network to deliver up to 40x faster Skype for Business performance.

All of these features and capabilities need to be easily managed, so we include MyAryaka at no additional cost. A real-time network and application visibility tool, MyAryaka gives enterprises a centrally managed, fully transparent network and application view – end-to-end.

Getting flawless Skype for Business connectivity means users won’t be derailed by WANs that cause unsatisfactory voice quality and frequent disconnects. With Aryaka’s global private network and global SD-WAN service, Skype for Business users can reliably collaborate with anyone, anywhere, on any device, with strong security. Guaranteed!

Deliver flawless Skype for Business performance to your global enterprise. Sign up for a proof of concept today.

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Hailed as a panacea for all things pandemic, Work from Home (WFH) has struck a chord with many of you. More so with the tech industry, where the idea of “work” was to ceremoniously dress up each morning and spend a good chunk of time sitting in a brick-and-mortar office or in traffic.

While the world is in a unique predicament, forward-thinking businesses are in a stealth war for attracting new talent.

Take Zillow, for example, which saw a steep surge in applicants as they rolled out a new remote work option. Almost 56,000 people applied to Zillow in the first quarter of 2021 — up by nearly 50 percent from last year.

Not a Panacea After All

However, WFH might be less than ideal for a good section of knowledge workers. With colleges closed, schools gone online, and no place to find a sojourn — the internet has been wonky. Also, that kitchen table offers none of the ergonomics or amenities of your office.

While that’s that — there are far more severe repercussions.

Remote work comes with myriad security pitfalls. Your mission-critical enterprise data is riding on the same network as your kid’s Tik Tok traffic. An unencrypted connection where data can be sniffed, stolen, and used in more ways than one can imagine. That’s Probably why 90 percent of IT professionals believe that remote working is not secure.

source

What is an Enterprise VPN?

Enterprise VPNs (commonly referred to as VPNaaS or a Cloud VPN) fortify enterprise resources and facilitate speedy and safe access to them — irrespective of where they are hosted (on-premises or in the cloud) or the devices and the network they are being accessed upon.

Another advantage of an enterprise VPN is its seamless integrations with all sorts of cloud service providers. AWS, Microsoft Azure, G Suite, and Salesforce, to name a few.

As an employee logs in to the enterprise VPN solution, an encrypted tunnel is created between the user and the resources over the existing network — enabling them to browse safely. Any middle-man trying to intercept the data gets nothing but a banana.

source

The Fully Managed Enterprise VPN Service

VPNs were introduced around 30 years ago alongside the Peer-to-Peer Tunnelling Protocol. However, given that the basic foundation of point-to-point connectivity stands obsolete wrt the modern nomadic workforce, VPN Service has now morphed into an as-a-service model rather than a site-to-site setup.

This is where a PoP based network architecture shines. A global mesh of PoPs enables rapid scaling to support any number of global end-users. In addition, it relieves IT teams from the bane of setting up regional hubs or VPN concentrators.

This mitigates the hectic task of hardware configuration, installation, and upkeep while letting the IT folks seamlessly onboard an enterprise’s VPN service across their entire network.

What Should Enterprises Consider Before Selecting a VPN Service?

Here are a few pointers to keep in mind:

On-Premises Centric Model vs Cloud-Based VPN Model.

An enterprise staple for years, and though it did a fair bit to help businesses, the architecture is very on-premises oriented. The core enterprise infrastructure is treated as the center of the universe and all the user traffic is funnelled through it.

While backhauling may work for a site-to-site VPN, it doesn’t sit well with SaaS, IaaS, and other cloud-based network traffic. In addition, the performance and security challenges of traditional VPNs are well recognized and documented. It fails to keep up with today’s dynamic and distributed cloud-based environments.

Cloud-First vs Cloud-Only VPN Model.

The Cloud-Only model is based on the assumption that the internet connectivity always remains predictable and stable enough to provide a pristine user experience. While cloud is the way forward, it rides heavily on robust network connectivity — which is anything but stable given the recent splurge of users. As an enterprise, you got to spot the difference between “Cloud-First” and “Cloud-Only.”

They are not the same.

Moreover, there is a fair amount of chance that your infrastructure is hybrid in nature. The lack of predictability of the application experience and performance is the biggest drawback here, as there are no guaranteed SLAs.

Scalability Is the Key

Enterprises are venturing into uncharted territories post-COVID. The supply chain management for a lot of them has moved from China to various other ASEAN countries. Meaning the lesser-known and poorly connected locations have suddenly become a hub for international businesses.

This sudden scalability is hard to keep up with, when you’re running around with propriety solutions on physical appliances. Despite coming with hefty price tags, the scalability of this model is quite limited and slow.

Centralized Management for VPN Deployment

Often overlooked, yet super crucial. An intuitive central management interface is imperative to VPN deployments — more so for a globally dispersed workforce. A single pane of glass view of numerous configurations and everything that’s under the hood.

Any sketchy behaviour, and you can shut down an endpoint with the click of a button.

Integrating VPN & SASE for More Security

Customarily, VPN solutions are treated as something completely separate from network and security deployments. That was until the market coined the idea of converging network and security intelligence to the cloud. The SASE model. Make sure your enterprise VPN solution is SASE compliant.

In addition, the solution should allow enterprises to keep their existing security policies in place, as IT teams invest a lot of time and resources in building robust policy and ensuring that the entire organization adheres to it.

source

Aryaka VPN Solutions for Enterprises

Aryaka Private Access is built from the ground up with the right mix of all technologies that you need to support a hybrid workforce — irrespective of their location, device, or their hosting model. (on-premises, cloud, hybrid)

The flexible consumption model also lets users dynamically relocate their subscribed bandwidth between cloud instances, branches, and remote users. Think of the branch offices, HQ, and remote workers as a single unified entity.

I understand you may have questions. Learn how we helped a U.S.-based sporting goods manufacturer in improving their remote access solution to brace the post-pandemic uncertainty.

You can also check out our webinar ‘Re-Defining VPN with SASE and a Cloud-First Solution’ to learn how Aryaka leverages a SASE-ready, Cloud-First WAN infrastructure to deliver on the flexibility required for today’s hybrid workplace.

Looking for more granular understanding? Learn more with our whitepaper on Integrating Remote Access and SD-WAN Managed Solutions.

Want to see us in action? Request a free demo.

The post What is an Enterprise VPN & How to Select the Right VPN for Your Enterprise? appeared first on Aryaka.

Every industry is undergoing a rapid transformation of digital operation. And with more employees working from virtually anywhere, online meetings and communication tools facilitating collaboration have become essential. There are plenty of studies available that show the growth in usage and users’ expectations for communication and collaboration tools. Aryaka’s State of the WAN 2021 Infographic provides a good snapshot of the trends and plans of the 1350 surveyed enterprises across all verticals and regions. Almost a quarter said that poor voice or video quality is a top concern when it comes to communication.

Fortunately, many of the Top WAN issues cited here can be addressed using a Managed SD-WAN and SASE as a service solution like Aryaka, and an enterprise-grade UCaaS solution for calling and meetings, like Fuze.

Fuze, a leader in the global cloud communications space, entered a partnership with Aryaka a year ago based on our global performance and ease of deployment.

Aryaka & Fuze – Delivering the Best Possible UCaaS Experience!

Aryaka service recognizes and marks UCaaS traffic, steers it optimally and dynamically across internet access links and through its layer 2 backbone, minimizing packet loss and latency, and delivering an optimized user experience. Fuze clients leverage Aryaka’s QoS-driven and resilient LinkAssure capabilities to connect to the closest Aryaka PoP. Traffic then traverses Aryaka’s SLA-driven backbone to the nearest Fuze peering point, bypassing the jitter, latency, and packet loss endemic to the public internet while also offering a highly available and integrated services offering to MPLS.

The map above depicts initial Aryaka PoP to Fuze peering, to be expanded over time. The left of the diagram depicts a Fuze user in Boston connecting via the low-latency LinkAssure path to the Aryaka PoP in Newark. Traffic then traverses the Aryaka backbone to the Ashburn PoP, where it is then handed over to the Fuze servers in their Ashburn DC site over a short internet hop.

Customers that traverse over Aryaka backbone experience an improved call quality when compared to regular internet. This is due to several key features that Aryaka offers for UCaaS and UDP traffic such as a stable subscribed bandwidth provisioned middle mile and packet loss remediation (LinkAssure) in the last mile.

Source: Aryaka

Recently Aryaka and Fuze collaborated to have dedicated Layer-2 peering between Fuze Data Centers located in San Jose and Ashburn and their corresponding Aryaka POPs in those cities. This has resulted in a dramatic improvement in call quality as the first mile to Fuze servers experiences zero packet loss and almost no jitter.

Benefits of Direct Peering – Much Improved Call Quality!

Here’s a mutual customer’s call quality comparison before and after peering. The data presented here is a screenshot from Fuze’s call quality monitoring dashboard for this customer. Average MOS indicates the overall call quality score for all calls while Average MinMOS indicates the average for the calls that had the worst MOS scores. That is a key number to keep a close eye on.  As you can see before the dedicated peering , call quality over Aryaka is above average and way better than that over the internet.

Before Dedicated Peering with Aryaka

*Actual MOS scores multiplied by 100

After Dedicated Peering with Aryaka

The average MinMOS score not only improved (14%) after the dedicated peering but it surpassed the overall average prior to dedicated peering with Aryaka. And the overall average improved 5%.

*Actual MOS scores multiplied by 100.

The overall call quality improvement was felt across all calls. The average call quality of the calls experiencing the lowest MOS score went up by 14% after the dedicated peering.

The improvement can be directly attributed to the dedicated peering in the first mile. We are in the process of replicating this worldwide. This is a clear example of how two distinct technology companies can collaborate to improve the overall end-user experience for their mutual customers.

Aryaka is constantly looking to enhance the overall customer experience by developing new capabilities as well as forging technology partnerships with like-minded partners who are willing to collaborate. The Aryaka-Fuze partnership combines to deliver an unparalleled UCaaS experience for enterprise customers.

Experiencing the best quality of voice and video is paramount in the digital workplace and any vertical. I want to highlight just one with manufacturing as one of the key verticals that both Fuze and Aryaka are focused on, with Fuze for Manufacturing: Unlocking Modern Communications from the Frontline to the Factory Floor and Aryaka helping manufacturing companies overcoming IT challenges with a Cloud-First WAN.

If you are interested to see our solution in action, book a demo here and select UCaaS deployment

And if you wish to learn more about our collaboration, register for a joint webinar on May 19^th, 2021.

Additional Resources

Solution Brief: https://www.aryaka.com/solution-brief/high-performance-fuze-global-cloud/

The post Creating a Unparalleled UCaaS Experience with Fuze and Aryaka appeared first on Aryaka.

I stumbled across an article the other day that perfectly captures the frustration employees around the globe experience with digital transformation, especially as productivity applications move to the cloud: “Why your Office 365 apps may be running ‘so darn slow’.”

Office 365 Slow Performance

Office 365 performance issues is all too common these days. But why is Office 365 so slow? Since these applications moved into cloud that could be a region, continent, or an ocean away, issues such as latency and network congestion often cause poor performance for Office 365 or other cloud-based applications used by enterprises all around the world. In a recent Gartner survey, 22% of IT leaders identified networking problems as the root cause for performance issues with Office 365.

This is why many CIOs and IT Managers are transforming their network with fully managed SD-WAN solutions. These IT leaders receive a steady stream of complaints from employees and know they must find an alternative connectivity and application delivery solution for Office 365, one that delivers the LAN-like experience knowledge workers are used to. After all, there is only so much that following best practices can help improve performance.

Cloud Adoption Poses Challenges to Enterprises

Despite what many vendors claim, the migration of mission-critical applications to the cloud isn’t a seamless transition. Yes, you’ll benefit from smoother collaboration, automatic backups, and ongoing updates and patches, but your enterprise traffic must now compete against consumer traffic, like e-commerce, streaming videos, and social media.

It simply isn’t enough for your business to just subscribe to cloud-hosted services. Guaranteeing fast access to these off-premises applications is equally important. And when legacy network solutions fail to deliver the required application performance for your cloud workloads, productivity suffers.

And with Office 365, the problem is even worse. So let’s try to understand the reason behind your Microsoft Word’s slow response, or why is SharePoint so slow for your employees?

Reasons for Slow Office 365 Performance

Office 365 places unique demands on the network. Office 365 requires increased bandwidth for synchronization with OneNote, software updates, template downloads, and a whole lot more. For many organizations, this leads to a significant increase in required bandwidth for Office 365. With so much traffic constantly going back and forth, standard firewalls could become a chokepoint and therefore slow down traffic even more. It’s a vicious cycle that undermines productivity.

“Our users in Wellington, New Zealand, saw delays between 10-15 seconds opening a standard Microsoft Word document, which obviously was impacting productivity. We knew this would be a barrier to further collaboration and helping us reach our revenue goals,” said Alan Crawford, CIO for City & Guilds Group, whose IT department is responsible for deploying Office 365 to all their global employees in over 100 countries. “It’s important to ensure the benefits we provide through group-wide application deployments are equally well received throughout every geographical region we serve.”

Blame Legacy Networks for Office 365 Performance Issues

But it’s not the design of Office 365 that is at fault. It’s the nature of the public Internet and legacy connectivity as a whole. Here are three reasons why legacy networking technologies slow down your Office 365 performance:

1) Congestion and latency on the public Internet kill performance

The Internet is many things, but reliable isn’t one of them. We all love the Internet because it’s fairly cheap, easy to use, and available in nearly every region. Thus, the public Internet has been the easiest and most popular way to connect branch offices to the cloud. But why is OneNote and excel so slow when accessed over the internet?

That’s because due to its flexibility, easy scalability, and lack of relative complexity, there has been an explosion of consumer and enterprise traffic over the Internet. And as a result, the middle mile of the Internet has become a hotbed for congestion and packet loss, which leads to poor performance of applications such as OneNote. And when application performance suffers, the end-user experience degrades, and the complaints come rolling in.

2) Slow and expensive MPLS solutions are not built for the cloud First off, only a handful of MPLS providers have partnered with Microsoft for ExpressRoute (private connectivity to Microsoft cloud resources including Office 365), thereby limiting your choices if you do decide to stick with this outdated networking technology.

In any case, MPLS was the old way of doing things. In today’s cut-throat economic environment, one in which businesses need to stay agile in order to stay competitive, the lengthy deployment schedules of MPLS (from three to six months, depending on your branch office locations) leaves you twiddling your thumbs while your employees are faced with severe Office 365 performance issues. Where it takes FOREVER to sync emails, word files go into a limbo, and just opening outlook freezes the entire computer. MPLS bandwidth is also prohibitively expensive, especially in geographies like China and the Middle East.

3) Legacy networks do not have built-in WAN Optimization

Because MPLS is so expensive, enterprises must do what they can to conserve expensive MPLS bandwidth. To do this, most MPLS-reliant businesses have also invested in CapEx-intensive WAN Optimization appliances on all sites.

Unfortunately, this approach is just not available for cloud applications. When connecting to the cloud to access enterprise applications like Office 365, symmetrical-appliance-based WAN Optimization is simply not possible. Cloud service providers would never support the installation of customer appliances at their data centers. Plus, deploying, maintaining, and managing these appliances at branch offices is a Herculean task, so how will you maintain and manage these off-site boxes?

Aryaka’s Network for the Office 365 Cloud

Aryaka’s fully managed Cloud-First WAN as a Service delivers Office 365 acceleration through a private, software-defined Layer 2 network. Through the strategic distribution of POPs, our private network is within 1-5 milliseconds from Microsoft Office 365 data centers around the world. Our proprietary and patented optimization stack is baked into our fully-meshed private global network, freeing businesses from the hassles of maintaining and managing appliances, while providing optimized performance to cloud-hosted instances. Aryaka thus maximizes O365 performance by tailoring the solution for each customer by selecting those O365 geo(s) that minimize the average distance to the users to minimize latency.

Aryaka also improves O365 performance when latency is high or bandwidth constrained by using WAN optimization.

Aryaka provides end users anywhere in the world with LAN-speed access
to Office 365, up to 40x faster than legacy connectivity solutions.

As a Microsoft ExpressRoute partner, we are also one of the first network service providers to enable our customers with private connectivity into critical Office 365 instances. Enterprises only need to connect to the Aryaka network (in less than a day!) to experience enterprise-grade connectivity and fast application performance, along with the flexibility and simplicity of the Internet.

But don’t take our word for it, here’s what our customers have to say about Aryaka’s Office 365 acceleration solution:

“Our colleagues around the world were able to load their files to SharePoint three times faster, we experienced a 200x reduction in the time to open 10MB SharePoint files, and saw three times improvement in the time taken to upload 10MB files to OneDrive. We look at Aryaka as the only SD-WAN for Office 365.”

Alan Crawford, CIO, City & Guilds Group

“Our employees used to frequently complain Microsoft Office 365 running slow, which was operating over the Internet. We needed a high-performance, cloud-ready wide area network that could make our lives easier. With Aryaka’s Office 365 acceleration solution, our employees experienced terrific performance improvements all over the world. I think the ability of Aryaka’s solution to connect to cloud providers like Microsoft is phenomenal and truly helps businesses like us to leverage the benefits of SaaS.”

Kenny Gilbert, CIO, TDK InvenSense

Are you looking to experience faster and better Office 365 performance for your global enterprise? Download our solution brief for more information.

Also, download this whitepaper to understand what are the optimal design patterns for a fully-managed Cloud-First WAN middle-mile infrastructure.

The post Office 365 Slow Performance: Why Your Network is to Blame & How to Fix It? appeared first on Aryaka.

Enterprises migrating to Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud-based offerings are learning the hard way that application performance varies wildly when end users are dispersed around the globe.

Microsoft reports that more than 50% of its commercial Office customers are now in the cloud, and the company expects that number to jump to two-thirds this year.

But global companies beware. Application performance challenges may lurk ahead. Consider the Office 365 deployment experience of Alan Crawford, CIO for City & Guilds Group, a worldwide leader in workplace skills, eLearning and executive coaching, prior to implementing SD-WAN. “Our users in Wellington, New Zealand, saw delays between 10-15 seconds opening a standard Microsoft Word document, which obviously was impacting productivity,” said Crawford.

SD-WAN technology can help ensure adoption of Office 365 goes off without a hitch, if you take into account these five key considerations:

1. Recognize the problem area:

Although Microsoft has data centers around the world, customers are only allowed one active instance of Office 365, so they tend to home their service near the largest base of users.  Those users access the cloud-based applications using the public Internet.

That works fine if the Microsoft data center in question is relatively close to the entire user base, but it becomes problematic for global enterprises like City & Guilds whose Office 365 instance is hosted in Dublin, Ireland.  The more remote the users, the more network hops are involved and the more handoffs between service providers, some of which are markedly behind the curve when it comes to infrastructure modernization.  That increases the chances of encountering network congestion and results in unreliability, high latency, packet loss, and jitter, all of which saps application performance.

Most vendors hawking Internet-based SD-WAN appliances as the answer are just putting lipstick on the pig because that approach still uses the public Internet for transport and cannot adequately address Office 365 performance issues.

2. Review the Microsoft options:

Microsoft wants Office 365 to succeed for all customers, even those with geographically dispersed users, so it offers lots of advice on how to assess and address the problem.   Microsoft makes it possible, for example, to tie into its global network through a co-location cloud exchange, but the onus is on you to figure out where and how to do that and establish relationship with a provider in that exchange. This also makes the implementation extremely time-consuming (on the order of months).  If the goal of moving to the cloud is to simplify your environment and increase agility, this option is a step backwards.

3. Take a holistic approach:

As popular as Office 365 is, it’s unlikely it will be the only SaaS service you need, so it doesn’t make sense to highly customize your network using various connectivity options to meet the performance requirements for each SaaS supplier. Most connectivity options don’t address application performance needs for the vast majority of SaaS applications. Instead, find a SD-WAN as-a-Service solution that can address the requirements for all of your SaaS resources.

4. Insist on built-in WAN optimization:

While bandwidth requirements forOffice 365 will vary greatly depending on the services used, the number of clients supported, etc., WAN traffic will be higher (in some cases, orders of magnitudes higher) than on-premises Office deployments because the server side of the equation is now hosted in the cloud.  That makes it imperative for organizations with global locations to use WAN optimization. Legacy WAN optimization technologies won’t work because they require a hardware or virtual appliance at either end of the WAN link to achieve the desired reduction in data to be transmitted.  Look for a SD-WAN service solution that has optimization built in.

5. Pick the right technology partner based on your business needs:

The best way to support global Office 365 deployments is by not looking at just SD-WAN, but a managed global connectivity delivered as a service. This approach gets you out of the business of constructing global private networks and offers you a “direct connect equivalent” to access Office 365 instances, which may be located thousands of miles away from the end users. This significantly improves Office 365 performance. Further, it enables you to consume SD-WAN on a subscription basis just like you do with Office 365, therefore, greatly simplifying your WAN environment, and making your network more agile.

That’s ultimately what the IT team at City & Guilds concluded.  Headquartered in London, City & Guilds works with education providers, governments and major corporations in over 100 countries to help shape and support skills development.  Team members around the world were having trouble using Office 365 hosted in Dublin.  For example, it could take more than 37 seconds to open one file from the corporate SharePoint drive.

Crawford said the organization considered several options, but ultimately opted to deploy Aryaka. “Our colleagues around the world were able to load their files to SharePoint three times faster, we experienced a 200 times reduction in the time to open 10MB SharePoint files, and saw three times improvement in the time taken to upload 10MB files to OneDrive,” he said.

If you’re a global enterprise looking to move to Office 365, take a long hard look at the network requirements and options because that’s what will ultimately determine the success of the roll out.

The post Five Key Considerations When Using SD-WAN to Accelerate Office 365 appeared first on Aryaka.

When it comes to productivity in today’s global business environment, every second counts.

If your employees can check Twitter, order lunch, and buy something from Amazon in the time it takes to run a report, then slow cloud or SaaS application is hurting your business.

A recent study on mobile and data management found that two seconds is the threshold for a website acceptability. 53% of visits are abandoned if a site takes longer than three seconds to load.

Slow performance is a huge problem with SaaS applications — and will continue to be as long as companies are relying on the public Internet for connecting to cloud and SaaS providers. But if you can improve network performance, you can also improve application performance.

According to Gartner, organizations are continuing to increase the utilization and investment in many cloud and SaaS services, including unified communications (UCaaS) and video conferencing, as well as the Internet of Things (IoT). This will fuel the growth of U.S. WAN traffic by 25% to 30% per year through 2020.

The growing demand for connectivity to and among cloud services forces enterprises to speed up their network upgrade projects to establish secure, reliable, and high-quality connections from branch offices to cloud providers.

The Most Precious Cargo of All

JAS Worldwide is a cargo company that provides logistic services and supply chain activities such as inventory management, warehousing services.

With nearly 4,000 employees in 240 offices, they handle air, ocean, customs brokerage, warehousing, import and export, and supply chain management. Perhaps the most vital items that they move is the data and information they use to keep their business running.

JAS needed to standardize multiple systems that were housed across the world. CIO Mark Baker implemented a SaaS-based ERP application called CargoWiseOne to standardized multiple systems that were housed around the world, but the public Internet provided unreliable performance and the application suffered as a result.

Depending on where JAS employees were located, they would be getting a much different user experience from using CargoWiseOne, and this had a ripple effect on their customer’s experience.

JAS needed to find a way to fix this problem for all their global employees to sustain their global productivity.

The solution

JAS leveraged Aryaka’s Managed SD-WAN to solve application performance challenges by establishing secure, reliable, and high-quality connections from branch offices to the CargoWiseOne cloud.

Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN combines cloud-based WAN optimization technology with enterprise-grade connectivity, which provided JAS with a way to directly connect to any cloud service and leverage world-class optimization benefits.

Aryaka operates a cloud-native, private WAN with 28 points of presence (POPs) around the world that are within 30 milliseconds of 95% of global business users and SaaS providers, including Cargo WiseOne. The POPs are connected by a meshed Layer 2 network that is fully managed and optimized using patented technology.

“Aryaka allowed JAS employees around the world to access CargoWiseOne through a secure, private, fast connection. Not only we feel productivity increased, I was delighted with how quickly we could exchange data. In addition, we saved 56% in cost savings,” said JAS CIO Mark Baker.

Aryaka also manages JAS’s global network on a 24×7 basis. No matter where disruptions occur, the source of the problem can be identified and resolved quickly. This frees up JAS’s IT team to focus on other projects and goals to move the organization forward.

A dilemma for global organizations

JAS is not alone and many global companies encounter similar challenges when it comes to cloud/SaaS application performance:

• How do you provide high application performance with alongside agility during rapid growth?
• How do you provide a worldwide staff with a consistent, productive end-user experience?
• How do you do all this while keeping the cost down?

Legacy solutions like MPLS combined with WAN optimization hardware, are both expensive and not built for quick deployment. And, they still don’t solve the problem of slow cloud/SaaS application performance.

Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN accelerates access to all public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments with a combination of our enterprise-grade private network and our globally distributed optimization platform.

This is not something that a traditional MPLS network could accomplish. With an agile, cloud-delivered solution in place, any organization can see a boost in cloud and SaaS application performance.

To learn more, download our white paper, MPLS Alternatives: The Definitive Guide.

The post Are SaaS Cloud Applications Slowing You Down? appeared first on Aryaka.

Collaboration is central to the $195 million firm, which offers training and skills development to education providers, governments, and companies in more than 100 countries.  While employees in the organization’s London headquarters had no problem accessing City & Guilds’ instance of Office 365 hosted in Ireland, performance was spotty for users in India, the Americas, and really bad for employees at the newly acquired shop in New Zealand.

That office, Crawford’s team would soon discover, was 27 Internet hops away from the Dublin data center.  The distance and the variation in service quality between the end points resulted in significant packet loss and latency problems which, for users, translated into 10-15 second delays to open Word documents.  It could take users in New Zealand up to 38 seconds to open a file from the corporate SharePoint drive, Crawford says, “which obviously was impacting productivity.”

Revenue at risk

City & Guilds’ teams rely on Office 365 to collaborate on everything from developing product content for exams to bidding for new work and crafting qualification proposals, Crawford says.  Performance issues hobble productivity, disrupt meetings and put revenue at risk by making it hard to collaborate on bids.  “We knew this would be a barrier to further collaboration and helping us reach our revenue goals,” he says.

So Crawford and his team went looking for an answer and found one in Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN solution, a service delivered over a private WAN that provides predictable, stable, accelerated user experiences regardless of where the application is hosted and the user is located.

Aryaka has SD-WAN access points around the world and delivers the capability as a managed service.  That means City & Guilds simply has to connect its offices via short Internet pipes to a local access point and Aryaka will groom the traffic and transport it over its global, private network directly to the Office 365 data center in Dublin.

Night and day

Crawford says the cutover to Aryaka was achieved in days and the results were evident immediately.  Whereas it took up to 28 seconds to send a 1MB email attachment, it now takes 3.74 seconds. While it used to take up to 38 seconds to load a 10MB SharePoint file, it now takes less than 13 seconds.

“Our colleagues around the world were able to load their files to SharePoint three times faster, we experienced a 200x reduction in the time to open 10MB SharePoint files, and saw three times improvement in the time taken to upload 10MB files to OneDrive,” Crawford says. “We look at Aryaka as the only SD-WAN for Office 365.”

With its own house back in order, City & Guilds can now get back to focusing on helping others benefit from sharing knowledge and learning.

To learn more download our solution brief on Office 365 Acceleration and see how Aryaka can improve your global application performance today.

The post How CIOs Solve Office 365 Performance Woes with a Global SD-WAN Service appeared first on Aryaka.

After an acquisition, IT puts a priority on getting new team members onboard so they can collaborate with peers, but that can be a challenge with international concerns, especially when it comes to sharing cloud resources. That was the hard lesson learned by City & Guilds Group, the global leader in elearning, offering everything from skills development to executive coaching.

When City & Guilds bought a company in New Zealand, IT migrated the group from a local Microsoft Office 365 service to City and Guilds Group’s implementation of Office 365 hosted in Microsoft’s Dublin data center so workers could collaborate with fellow employees in the UK, India and the Americas, says CIO Alan Crawford.

That’s when the trouble started, Crawford explains in a webinar about his challenge and the solution that ultimately fixed it.

“When you acquire companies, you really want to give them a great experience,” Crawford says. “One thing you don’t want to do — because people tend to notice — is make their experience poorer. And by putting them on our Office 365 that made their experience a lot poorer.”

The problem his tech team discovered, was that there were 27 Internet hops between New Zealand and the Dublin data center, and that resulted in significant latency and problems such as 10-15 second delays to open Word documents.

Crawford and his team immediately started looking for an answer and found one in Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN solution, a service delivered over a private WAN that can provide predictable, stable, and accelerated user experiences regardless of the location of the user or application.

In the webinar, Crawford outlines in depth the struggles City & Guilds Group faced connecting remote workers to Microsoft’s cloud-based Office 365 suite of productivity tools, and how a Global SD-WAN solved the problem.

Some of the questions also addressed are:

• Does SD-WAN mean I don’t need MPLS at all?
• How do you migrate from MPLS to SD-WAN?
• How much WAN optimization can be achieved if most of the traffic is encrypted?
• Is QoS in place, and how does that map to MPLS classes of service?
• How long does deployment take?
• How is it billed?

For an in-depth discussion about City & Guilds’ Office 365 problems and its experience with deploying SD-WAN, as well as answers to the key questions posed by the audience, please check out the webinar “City & Guilds’ SD-WAN success: Optimizing Office 365 for global enterprises.”

The post SD-WAN Solutions for Office 365 Application Performance appeared first on Aryaka.

Salesforce is one of the first applications that’s extended to new offices when U.S. companies expand into global locations, such as China. However, slow application performance often limits adoption and usage, thus negatively impacting business execution for newly opened branches.

“China sales reps weren’t updating Salesforce data until after the deals closed because it was too slow to update,” recalled the Salesforce administrator for a global enterprise, “As a result, we didn’t have any visibility into what was going on.”

For the China branch office, tasks were taking twice as long as their U.S counterparts. Business productivity was degrading and it took more people to complete the work.

“Salesforce impacts the heart of everything we do: Sales, Revenue, Marketing, Payroll, Client Success, you name it,” explained the VP of Sales, “If Salesforce performs poorly, it also impacts everything we do.”

Salesforce vs. Sales Force
Unfortunately, the speed of Salesforce can be an issue for many end-users across the world. When the company’s sales force starts having major performance delays with applications like Salesforce, it quickly becomes an issue for IT, and often the CIO.

In fact, some findings from a recent CIO Insight report highlighted that IT professionals are beginning to feel the heat when it comes to SaaS application performance:

• 90% said they received complaints about application performance
• 94% said their network is mission-critical
• 67% said end-users are demanding enhanced application performance

The Problem with Global Performance: Centralized Distribution
Although Salesforce is a world-renowned SaaS application, performance suffers due to what is known as centralized distribution.

This is when the SaaS application is hosted in a single data center or point of presence (PoP), where it is accessed by end-users around the world.

With centralized SaaS applications, data from global end-users must travel long distances

By having a centralized location for their software, Salesforce makes the job of maintaining their services more efficient. It also ensures every customer has the latest possible update.

But as you can see from the diagram above, this is great if you’re close to the PoP. For remote users, this distance can cause a performance issue.

This Distance Factor is an Issue for CIOs
Overcoming the distance issue for Salesforce and other SaaS applications is one thing keeping CIOs up at night.

For example, a North American company needs to deploy Salesforce to centralize their sales and leads data. Most of their users are in the U.S., so when the company signs up, Salesforce will deploy them to a PoP closest to the U.S. headquarters.

The U.S. teams are happy, but what about the teams located in Australia, China, or the Philippines?

Anyone overseas will be impacted by this deployment decision because they are forced to access the company’s Salesforce data center in the United States. What’s more is that the minute a U.S. employee has to conduct business overseas, they too will see an immediate drop in application performance.

The reason why is end-users in remote geographies have to log into the software through the internet and their data has to travel from their location to the U.S. in order to access the application.

Because of the distance data must travel over internet, Salesforce performance for worldwide users will always be an issue.

Therefore, if there are SaaS application performance issues…well, that is a problem for the network to solve.

The Solution: A Modern Network Built for Worldwide Salesforce Users
Since Salesforce is centralized, what’s needed to solve the performance issue is a network with global distribution, like Aryaka SmartConnect. With PoPs located on all six habitable continents, SmartConnect is able to bypass the public internet and provide global end-users with faster performance.

Aryaka SmartConnect also includes built-in application acceleration software. This increases the amount of data that can pass through the connection, and reduces the latency between the end-user and Salesforce. Application performance improves and the user experience is more consistent.

Aryaka SmartConnect, a globally distributed network, provides faster connectivity for branch offices and end-users to Salesforce worldwide.

In other words, Aryaka SmartConnect shortens the distance between remote end-users and Salesforce, while also providing a much faster pathway to the service.

A network with this infrastructure is also easy to scale and deploy for any global enterprise because no additional hardware is necessary.. With Aryaka SmartConnect, the public internet is the only required access point. As long as an end-user has an internet connection, they can access Salesforce (or any other SaaS application) through Aryaka’s globally distributed network, and have the same performance consistency from anywhere in the world.

The Salesforce Superhighway: Same Delivery, Faster Transportation
Nearly half a thousand enterprises are using Aryaka SmartConnect to access their mission-critical SaaS applications, including Salesforce.

End-users are logging in through the internet, but behind the scenes, they’re on an accelerated superhighway bypassing the distance that once made application performance a factor. Companies receive all the benefits of Salesforce collaboration, with the application performance as if the software were on-premises.

Aryaka SmartConnect is what enables global enterprises to improve the speed of their Salesforce application performance. A globally distributed network with built-in application acceleration software provides an enterprise with the quality connection they would not find through the public internet. Furthermore, they are able to connect their global end-users with fast and reliable access to Salesforce that improves business execution.

Accelerate your application performance on the Salesforce superhighway, sign up for a free trial today.

The post Is your Salesforce Slow? — Here’s How You Can Solve IT! appeared first on Aryaka.

When Marc Benioff first came up with the idea of offering Salesforce.com as a cloud-based application in 1999, little did he know about its ripple effect in the field of enterprise software. The idea was to move applications to the cloud, making them widely available for organizations of all shapes and sizes. The SaaS model offered a ton of flexibility and scalability by allowing end-users to access applications from anywhere, using a web-enabled device.

A lot has changed since then, and global SaaS revenues are projected to reach $106B in 2016, increasing by 21% over 2015. This growth has led to more customers and greater global demands. It has also caused businesses to think differently when deploying long distance networks, or WANs, as traditional technologies like MPLS were not built for the cloud.

The Need for Cloud and SaaS Acceleration
With all the benefits SaaS offers, you might think it’s a cure-all for global enterprise productivity. However, in order to take advantage of the full benefits of SaaS, the enterprise WAN needs to be up for the task.

Accessing cloud services and SaaS applications like SalesForce.com and Office 365 over congested public networks can be unreliable and slow, due to heavy traffic, packet loss, and fluctuating latencies. Application slowness results in poor end-user experience which almost invariably causes churn.

Unfortunately, MPLS cannot help as it offers limited connectivity to a few public cloud services. Plus, MPLS has its own shortfalls such as long deployment timelines, high costs, and complexity. The fact that most SD-WAN and hybrid WAN architectures need to rely on MPLS for performance, means they are inheriting the shortfalls of MPLS.

Global SD-WAN Focused on SaaS Performance
Aryaka’s global SD-WAN service runs over our global private network that bypasses the public Internet, to deliver MPLS-grade connectivity globally, without the high costs and hassles. With a reliable, cloud-scale, global private network, Aryaka enables users to connect seamlessly with their cloud applications.

Aryaka combines the benefits of SD-WAN technology with reliable global private connectivity and embedded WAN optimization, to deliver enhanced application performance. Thus, Aryaka’s global SD-WAN service significantly improves access to, and utilization of SaaS applications.

We deliver far more than SD-WAN technology. We have a software-defined global connectivity service that delivers performance, agility, reliability, and security, while alleviating the networking challenges your IT team faces today.

And the best part…it’s a fully-managed service.

The Critical “Service” Component
With today’s need to adapt to ever-changing applications and business environments, designing, provisioning, monitoring, and managing WAN infrastructure requires specialized IT resources. Let’s just say it’s not for the faint of heart. IT departments would be better served if they could focus on more strategic projects, rather than dealing with customer support calls about network downtime and performance problems.

Years ago, Aryaka realized that by offering a fully-managed global SD-WAN service, we could not only simplify network infrastructure, provide agile WAN deployments, and solve application performance and reliability issues, but also help IT by offloading the arduous tasks associated with designing, deploying and managing WANs.

Not only do we take care of all the WAN heavy lifting and lowering network costs, we get companies up and running within days (and not months taken by MPLS).

The days of having IT personnel set up WANs themselves, order network links, figure out all the equipment needed, and go through endless testing cycles, are over…Aryaka’s global SD-WAN service has taken care of all of it!

To evaluate Aryaka’s global SD-WAN for your company, sign up for a free trial today!

The post Choosing the Right SD-WAN for Your SaaS Connectivity appeared first on Aryaka.

We all know that in the world of the cloud-first digital enterprise, key business processes rely on network performance – if the network doesn’t deliver on the expected SLAs, there is direct impact on business results and employee productivity.

A typical use case involves remote offices in distant geographies accessing application data that is stored in the public cloud from a remote location. In close collaboration with our partner GAB ExactlyIT Solutions GmbH, we ran a real-world test last month involving a typical scenario: the remote user is based in Beijing (China) and must access application data in the Microsoft Azure Region Europe West via an IPSec tunnel. This configuration is often encountered when:

• The remote office is connected to HQ or the enterprise DC via a traditional network configuration that backhauls all traffic to the main site before the traffic breaks out into the public internet in order to reach the public cloud.
• DIY SD-WAN has been deployed with a policy that breaks out public cloud traffic into the internet locally, directly at the branch (as often recommended in SD-WAN design guides) but the application and data that reside only in a certain geography.
• The end user is a mobile user or remote worker that needs to log into a corporate VPN that has a compromised topology when it comes to optimally support the required public cloud application/data (which is sometimes dictated by geo-political considerations).

It is important to point out that, while the problem in some cases could be partially remediated by optimizing the routing policy for that particular cloud application, the fact that the average enterprise deploys over 50 public cloud applications makes that particular per-branch, per-cloud-app optimization extremely work intensive. And the dynamic nature of cloud applications quickly renders any local routing policy obsolete, hence requiring constant, work-intensive and error-prone updates.

Also, when enterprises analyze such cloud application issues, their first stop is to monitor the public cloud performance. Microsoft Azure openly publishes performance degradation and outages, however the fundamental issue is very often due to network latency, jitter and packet loss that severely impact TCP connection setup as well as throughput. What’s worse: over the Internet, and particularly over long distances when multiple ISPs are involved, such issues are very hard to pin down. Furthermore, they are often transitory and often outside any singular ISP’s control.

Let’s investigate the effect this has on a remote user’s experience in our first test case.

Test Case 1: Cloud Application Performance Issues Over Long-Distance IPSec Tunnel

As Figure 1 shows, the office is in Beijing. The application data the user will try to download resides in the Azure Region Europe West.

Figure 1: File Transfer over IPSec Tunnel

The real-world measurement is sobering: It takes the user 8 minutes and 42 seconds to download a 100MB file. This could be a product video that a remote sales representative is trying to download to address a question during a meeting with a customer prospect. Clearly, no one is going to wait nearly 10 minutes in a meeting to get a question answered. The result of this underwhelming cloud application performance is remote worker frustration, complains and overall loss of productivity.

The network behavior is also disruptive for smaller files, as exemplified by the 10MB file transfer example, which is a very usual file size. Not only is the transfer time unnecessarily long, but it’s also highly unpredictable by ranging anywhere from 39 to 102 seconds, thus adding to user frustration as they wonder what is wrong.

Note that local Internet performance in the Beijing region is quite good, so that is not the sole source of the problem we are observing here. The key issue is the fact that TCP/IP traffic performance will always suffer when long delays and jitter as well as packet loss are incurred due to the long geographical distance and the multitude of ISPs involved in handling the IPSec tunnel end-to-end.

Test Case 2: Cloud Application Performance Improvement with Aryaka SmartServices

Aryaka’s SmartConnect and SmartCloud services lets customers connect to their SaaS applications and data over a global connection that delivers on strict, deterministic SLAs. This overcomes the latency, jitter and packet loss issues associated with the internet middle-mile and provides a cost-effective yet superior alternative for accelerating cloud application performance.

Now let’s see how the exact same test scenario performed over the Aryaka solution:

Figure 2: File Transfer with Aryaka SmartCloud

The real-world measurement for the same test case with the Aryaka solution shows that now it only takes 1 minute and 59 seconds to download the same 100MB file. That’s a 400% performance improvement. This is a time that allows the same remote sales representative to bridge the wait time with a short conversation about another topic, allowing them to effectively address the question. Better response times deliver on tangible business benefits.

For the smaller file size, not only is the transfer window much shorter, but it also leads to predictable performance, which establishes users’ trust in system performance by eliminating random system behaviors.

How does Aryaka unlock such a cloud application performance advantage for its customers? Three of Aryaka’s SmartServices are key:

• SmartConnect: Aryaka’s Global Layer 2 Core Network is built on privately held high-performance links that provide strict latency, jitter and packet loss guarantees. SmartConnect also provides traffic optimization and implements proxies and other technologies to dramatically accelerate the performance of TCP/IP globally with its TurboNet and TurboApp technology.
• SmartCloud provides an optimal topology to deliver cloud application performance in any global or regional deployment. By optimally peering with Cloud Providers in different geographies with high performance connections (in Azure’s case, ExpressRoute), enterprises are guaranteed the best cloud application performance without the burden of constantly optimizing routing policies in every branch.
• Secure Remote Access provides mobile, remote users immediate access into the Aryaka Global Layer 2 Core Network, overcoming the performance issues of many corporate VPN solutions in the cloud-first era.

MPLS still represents a foundational technology in most global enterprise WANs. MPLS can deliver high availability and deterministic quality of service within a service provider’s domain, hence network managers have been relying on MPLS for 20 years. On the other hand, MPLS is costly, slow to deploy, and its traditional hub-and-spoke architecture from the branch to HQ and/or the DC does not support the overwhelming need to optimally support cloud deployments. Do-it-yourself SD-WAN solutions allow traffic to be routed directly to the internet at the branch, however they often still rely on costly MPLS links to support traffic that is perceived as business critical.

The Aryaka Difference

As this performance test shows, Aryaka’s Cloud-First WAN provides superior cloud application performance improvements, even -or especially- over very long geographic distances. We were able to improve file download times from Europe to China by 400%.

Aryaka allows network managers to deliver on a global network infrastructure optimally suited to the needs of digital business, delivering on simplicity, agility and reduced operational cost. Aryaka customers can leverage cost-effective internet access technology even for the most business-critical applications given Aryaka’s patented technologies to deliver on hardened performance parameters, as well as Aryaka’s long established global presence and experience in partnering with the best local ISPs.

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