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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If you have followed the Software-Defined Networking discussion over the years, it all started here. I urge you to watch this presentation to truly understand the fundamentals of the motivation for SDN, an excellent presentation by Prof Scott Shenker from Berkley University, one of the “fathers” of SDN. The key moment is at about 7:45, when Shenker states that, unlike the software world, networking had completely failed to provide abstractions, and that abstractions are key to simplification and effective reuse.

Virtual Overlay Network: What is it?

Based on this vision, abstractions in networking indeed started to happen. First in the Data Center, and then in the wide area network with SD-WAN. The solution is generically called a virtual overlay network. Virtual overlay networks create a software-defined, elegantly orchestrated, agile and intent-based solution on top of a static, slow-to-adapt-to-change underlay solution (based on MPLS, internet, 4/5G or direct connectivity). I will make a contentious point: while agile virtual overlays indeed deliver on digital enterprise needs to greatly accelerate adaptability to business needs, they can also be a Fata Morgana. They can deliver on an illusionary vision of reality: you get the benefits of software-defined agility, but in real life the pitfalls of the static underlay remain – only they have been obfuscated to you. I know I will get challenged on this – it is a complex discussion, but let me provide two proof points:

Sd WAN Overlay vs Underlay

1. In the Gartner Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics report for 2019 [1], the main frustrations of customers are tool sprawl as well as the time required to establish RCA (root cause analysis). I am not surprised. It used to be that your single-source router vendor’s management panel provided you with complete visibility into your routed WAN network.

   

   With SD-WAN virtual overlays, you very often keep that infrastructure as your underlay (and if you don’t, you still have a routing infrastructure at the core of your MPLS provider’s network), and you roll out a more agile virtual infrastructure on top of it. So now you have two separate layers to manage, adding to the tool sprawl issue, and the fact you have to do swivel-chair root cause analysis, correlating the data from the two layers in your head, is not going to help time to resolution. You will see application performance issue pop up in your virtual overlay management tool. But how do they correlate? A virtual tunnel may well map to several physical routers and MPLS paths in the physical underlay. The mapping between the two will invariably require valuable expert time, detracting from the time said experts can spend on strategic business initiatives rather than troubleshooting. It’s a well-known industry benchmark that enterprises spend over $60B a year simply trouble-shooting their network infrastructures. That’s about as much as they spend acquiring core network gear.

2. The increasingly virtualized network function environment both layers have adopted adds a third dimension to network performance troubleshooting. It used to be that you could trust the ASICs in your router (or Multi-layer switch, the distinction has become near meaningless over the years) to always deliver on wireline performance. If you had an issue it would seldom be wireline forwarding performance, it could be probably attributed to issues with capacity planning or erroneous DSCP re-marking along the way. That line gets dramatically blurred with virtualization – of course it can still be insufficient bandwidth to address new demands, but it can also be CPU or memory allocation to the particular, virtualized network function that is falling short within a virtualized service chain. Both in the overlay and underlay. I don’t think it would be fun to trouble-shoot an environment with as many un-correlated variables.

This is great for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics companies, who offer a myriad of tools to address many (but not even remotely all) of these issues. It’s up to enterprise network managers to consolidate the information from all of these tools and -again- it’s no surprise to me IT departments are immensely frustrated with the required tool sprawl to address their needs when monitoring underlays and overlays and related application performance.

Cloud-First Global SD WAN Solutions by Aryaka

If you are a network manager that would rather spend time planning strategically than living a reactive life troubleshooting issues 70% of your time, Aryaka has a solution for you: design with intent first and then get 100% end-to-end visibility across a global network infrastructure that provides immediate, single-pane-of-glass visibility into network and application performance. How does it work?

1. When it comes to last mile connectivity, Aryaka’s SmartLINK connectivity delivers on MPLS-like SLAs at internet access cost (read more in my last blog).
2. Aryaka’s SmartCONNECT global L2 network provides utterly deterministic performance when it comes to the QoS trifecta (packet loss, latency, jitter). This can *not* be delivered over a global L3 overlay infrastructure.
3. The MyAryaka customer web portal provides immediate, end-to-end network and application performance visibility and status – all the way from company-wide abstracted views, with the ability to drill down into individual links for very fast root cause analysis.
   

The proof is in over 800 enterprise customers that, after adopting the technology, never consider an alternative. And as you can imagine, many of them previously implemented their global WANs with do-it-yourself technology, manually configuring complex policies and change management. They just prefer to focus on relevant strategic business issues for the network in the digital age such as:

• Fast global connectivity
• Optimal support for XaaS, anytime and anywhere
• Support for temporary, ephemeral sites and requirements (pop-up shops, large-scale physical and virtual events, construction sites, etc)
• Local presence in highly regulated markets (for example, China)
• Immediate ability to accommodate ever-changing application and business needs

In our industry, we discuss Intent-Based Networking as the elusive ideal we should strive for. Aryaka delivers on it here and now. We can implement your global WAN infrastructure within 48 hours – just state your intent. We help you visualize (and we will also proactively inform you with our 365x7x24 expert support) any WAN issues or trends you should address, end to end.

Instead of providing you with a Fata Morgana of what Intent-Based Networking could be, we deliver on the reality of it.

Want to learn more? Please book a demo with one of our experts.

Note [1]: The NPMD MQ report is gated for subscribers, but several NPMD vendors have it for download, for example https://blog.viavisolutions.com/2019/02/13/npmdmq/.

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A 60-year young company with a rich history that was founded, formed and created on a belief that there was a better way to administer benefits at a lower cost without sacrificing quality. That is ProView Global or PvG global – an innovative company based out of the Philippines, that leverages deep domain expertise and technology-based solutions to administer outsourced employee benefits for their customers globally.

I sat down with Michael Rivera, the President and Chief Operating Officer of PvG global to discuss a bit about the wonderful Filipino culture, concepts of knowledge process outsourcing, the importance of connectivity in their business model, why the Internet was just not good enough, post pandemic architectural shifts as well as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as it applies to the outsourcing industry.

Michael was a great conversationalist and someone who understood how to straddle different cultures, global business models and trends, while preserving the core mission of PvG and focusing on a “customer-first” attitude. Very few executives can straddle company decision making and yet have a “roll your sleeves” kind of attitude to get things done. Michael is one of them.

You can listen to the podcast with Michael here –

Here are my takeaways from the conversation –

1. Understanding the “why” makes all the difference in the Outsourcing Industry

For many of us that deal with some form of business process outsourcing (BPO), the degree of customer experience varies greatly if the person we are engaged with relates to our particular situation. Michael painted a contrast between transactional work citing claims adjudication as an example which could be accomplished following a set of discrete steps along a well-defined process. However, if the same individual (or software) were to be trained on the “why” including applying cognitive and analytical skills, thereby providing more context and delivers a superior outcome. Interestingly a lot of conversational AI companies are really focused on this in much the same manner that Michael and his team have focused on at PvG for their workforce.

2. Service Industries excel when they demonstrate empathy

A business usually outsources when they feel someone else has better expertise, a lower cost structure and time to market abilities than is possible through internal means. What they gain in these areas they tend to lose if the outsourced entity does not have contextual understanding or a true sense of ownership and accountability, and more importantly a sense of empathy. Michael drew a parallel between the Filipino nurses, who are among the best in the industry and how his own company approaches outsourcing. They both excel because they demonstrate a natural desire to serve and care for others. Service excellence shifts from good to great with empathy.

3. Culture attracts or repels talent, but nurturing a positive culture requires determined leadership

When paychecks plateau between different jobs, what attracts talent to an organization is a sense of purpose and their resonance with the culture. We see employees leave organization because there experience cultural dissonance and conversely, they stay despite lucrative offers from other organizations because they do not feel the cultural resonance. However, developing and maintaining this culture does not come easy. It must be top down and driven by the leadership of the organization and requires constant nurture. Michael talks about culture being an obsession at PvG and draws an analogy with farming. A good farm needs as much tending to during a drought as it does when there is plentifulness. A company can never stop working on culture.

4. When the business has mission critical applications, Internet-class connectivity is just not good enough

For an outsourcing culture with remote employees, or distributed office locations, each of whom are empowered to deliver the best possible experience to their clients, having access to stable connectivity and highly predictable application performance experience is critical to their success. While Internet is good, sometimes it is not good enough and Michael makes the point that the cycle time of transactions should be as good as if not better than that of their customers. This can only happen when there’s access to high-performance private connectivity that’s stable, predictable and tailored for application performance.

5. Proactive governance should complement technology for the right security posture

The shift that happened during the pandemic caused PvG to shift their entire operational model in just three days! As Michael says, there is no playbook for going remote wholesale in a matter of days. There are fundamental guiding principles such as taking care of employees, but there’s also accountability towards customers and liability. Going remote overnight meant a loss of perimeter security control. While the technology elements were present, the team had to activate tracking on individual workstations to track unwarranted behavior away from the corporate office, monitor compliance risks, invest in random internal audits including video audits and bring in state of the art identity and authorization elements to effect a lockdown in light of any deviations.  This allowed them to maintain high integrity and trust in their customer transactions including handling of sensitive data

6. The noise from mouse clicks beats digital dashboards to demonstrate user experience

We are all used to asking for fancy digital  dashboards to prove the value of a solution and measure the ROI. While all these are no doubt important, f or Michael, it was the noise of mouse clicks and employees banging their desk with their mouse out of frustration at the slow application performance that went away entirely when they implemented the Aryaka solution. He says it with a laugh, but I can imagine him walking into a hall full of employees in front of their computers, banging their mouses and clicking to hit refresh and what a powerful value metric it is when all that gives way to happy employees and a calm environment! If this does not personify user experience, I don’t know what else does

7. RPA and conversational AI will revolutionize the benefits administration industry

Benefits administration is a heavily regulated industry, handling sensitive data and perhaps hasn’t undergone much digital transformation aside from “webification” as Michael calls it. However, he believes RPA holds tremendous promise to change this, even though there aren’t good solutions that can manage an end-to-end workflow and the offerings are siloed. Vendors should persist and unlock the value this can bring into the equation benefiting both the administrator with efficiencies and cost benefits, as well as the employee who would have a much superior experience and engagement. The value chain will likely consolidate to deliver the maximum benefit. And that would be a great benefit for a benefits administration company.

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Our manufacturing customers are a diverse bunch. From automatic test equipment, automotive  speakers and smart sensors to consumer-facing beauty products and sustainable packing solutions for the transportation of produce, our customers range across every vertical with headquarters, sites, manufacturing plants and a growing number of remote workers all over the world.

When we recently surveyed our customers in the manufacturing space to learn more about their networking and security challenges and priorities, we found a few common threads among the responses, despite the many differences in product offerings and geographies.

Global applications must perform at a high-level to support product development everywhere in the world.  

When asked which use cases Aryaka helps solves, the top two responses were application performance (71%) and improve connectivity to China (51%). Though we received the same top two responses in our previous survey to our entire customer database, the response percentage from our manufacturing customers was much higher. There are two reasons for this: manufacturing companies often need to collaborate on design applications, like CAD/CAM software, and a higher percentage of manufacturing companies compared to other industries, have a presence in China, whether it is offices, remote workers or manufacturing plants.

In one example, Teradyne, a global electronic test and industrial automation company that specializes in semiconductor test equipment and collaborative robotics, is headquartered in the U.S. with a globally dispersed product development team spread across Asia, Europe and North America. The team frequently collaborates in interactive sessions on graphic intense tools. Prior to deploying Aryaka’s managed SD-WAN solution, Teradyne was supporting eight different engineering design centers which was tedious and costly, and still application performance for remote engineers, particularly those in remote places around the world, was suffering. As a result, Teradyne estimates that remote engineers were up to 50% less efficient before deploying Aryaka. Additionally, they saw application performance in China improve by up to 15X.

Application speed is critical, but reliability is even more important.

We hear this time and again from our customers. They need to accelerate applications, but providing stability is even more critical.

In one example, Jumio, which provides identity verification through AI solutions and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, was not experiencing reliable network performance with their MPLS provider. Now, “Aryaka provides us the stability we need to work on customized applications… it also provides us with the best route/path and less latency.” This stability has led to

Similarly, Henny Penny, a U.S.-based manufacturer of commercial grade food equipment, noted the importance of a stable connection to China:

Manufacturing enterprises need a network that can support multi-cloud connectivity in order to enable digital transformation initiatives, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) projects, big data projects and more.

Pulse Electronics, for example, is a global leader in the design and manufacturing of electronic components headquartered in the U.S. They first selected Aryaka SmartServices to solve their connectivity to China issues and ready their network for digital transformation initiatives and an upcoming IIoT project because their MPLS network with WAN optimization hardware wasn’t providing the performance and reliability they needed. After deploying Aryaka SmartServices, they were not only able to accelerate key applications (Salesforce, Microsoft Office365, AutoCAD and SOLIDWORKS to name a few), but they were able to provide stable connectivity for their end-users in China, increasing productivity, and launching their IIoT initiatives.

Operational simplicity is king.

An increase in multi-cloud environments also means an increase in complexity. Couple that with all of our manufacturing customers being in globally dispersed companies juggling multiple ISP providers in various time zones, and customers are searching for ways to simplify their network and save time. For our customers, our managed services provide that operational simplicity they need.

Looking back at our Teradyne example – the IT team was support eight different engineering design centers, each with their own local infrastructure, to support the product development team. It was costly, complicated and time-consuming to support these remotely. With Aryaka, they were able to centralize their global design centers. Jumio was also able to simplify their network with Aryaka. After deploying Aryaka SmartServices, they estimate their team saves about 10-25% of time that was previously spent on incident resolution.

No matter the product or geography, our manufacturing customers trust Aryaka to provide the agility, reliability and operational simplicity they need to support their business now and into the future.

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

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

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

Hybrid Workplace and Multi-Cloud Adoption

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

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

CIOs face challenges to deliver flexibility and enable the Hybrid Workplace

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

Multi-Cloud adoption and spend on the rise

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

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

The pandemic has been hard on all of us.

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

Learn more about our SmartServices

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

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If you’ve been in IT for a while, you probably remember the days when your data and applications were housed in a data center that was close to the employees who used it. Those were the good old days, right?

That’s all changed — and fast — as employees increasingly pursue flexible working arrangements and more and more business is done in the cloud instead of physical networks. This is now the new reality, according to McKinsey & Company’s article “Strategic Principles for Competing in the Digital Age.”

Staggering amounts of information are accessible as never before—from proprietary big data to new public sources of open data. Analytical and processing capabilities have made similar leaps with algorithms scattering intelligence across digital networks, themselves often lodged in the cloud. Smart mobile devices make that information and computing power accessible to users around the world.

Because this change is happening so quickly, many Wide Area Networks (WAN) have not kept pace and enterprise productivity is suffering. WAN outages can bring your business to a grinding halt, and improperly configured networks can be a major security vulnerability.

In a cutthroat business environment, every second counts and no one wants to make headlines for a data breach. Luckily, there’s a solution to both of those problems that can adapt to your company as it continues to grow and change.

Change is just about only constant in today’s landscape, and the rate of that change is only going to increase as we move further into the 21st century. This post will help you understand exactly what’s wrong with your network, and what you can do about it.

Big Data, Big Needs

Data is being used like never before in just about every sector and every type of business within it. Big Data allows companies to understand their customers like never before and deliver better products and services to them as a result.

However, that data is only valuable if it can be efficiently transmitted to all of the applications and all of the people who need to access it. This is not the place for a slow network. Your competitors have access to the same data that you do and every second you delay is an advantage they can potentially gain

Not only that, the ways employees work together have changed, too. Team members who used to work down the hall from each other may now work from home or in offices around the world. They need to be able to communicate with each other just as quickly online as they would face to face.

McKinsey weighed in on this trend as well:

During the last decade, the business infrastructure has become digital with increased interconnections among products, processes, and services. Across many firms spanning different industries and sectors, digital technologies (viewed as combinations of information, computing, communication, and connectivity technologies) are fundamentally transforming business strategies, business processes, firm capabilities, products and services, and key interfirm relationships in extended business networks. Accordingly, we argue that the time is right to rethink the role of IT strategy, from that of a functional-level strategy — aligned but essentially always subordinate to business strategy — to one that reflects a fusion between IT strategy and business strategy.

Sounds great, right? But, as you may know, putting it into practice is a little more difficult.

Most enterprise WAN technology is at least 20 years old. Think about how much business and IT have changed since then. Trying to use one of these networks for Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, or other modern-day business staples is like trying to run the Boston Marathon in a pair of beat-up old sneakers. You might be able to pull it off, but it certainly wouldn’t be your best performance.

Silly examples aside, outdated networks are a huge problem for many businesses, and it’s time to do something about it. There’s too much at stake not to.

No Good Option

According to a recent survey, only about 17 percent of network organizations have all of the visibility they need to effectively troubleshoot WAN performance problems. In contrast, nearly half of respondents said their visibility was “barely adequate” or had somewhat frequent gaps.

Many businesses rely on Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) or the public Internet to power their networks. Both of these options are at least 20 years old, and each comes with its own set of problems.

MPLS tends to be more stable in terms of data transmission but is slowed down by the laws of physics as information moves from one end of the country, or one end of the world, to the other. In addition, creating a new MPLS connection point takes a great deal of time — anywhere from a few weeks for an office close by and months or even years for an office in a new country.

As you may know if you’ve ever tried to do any reporting from MPLS, it’s next to impossible to have any visibility without additional software. This adds expense and makes strategic planning difficult. On top of all that, it can’t connect to 98 percent of cloud or SaaS applications.

The Internet, on the other hand, is faster and readily accessible by any application, but security is a major concern. Data breaches are becoming all too common these days, and your network needs to keep pace with increasingly sophisticated hackers.

Internet solutions, while faster than MPLS on the whole, are not immune from latency and uptime issues that plague MPLS. It’s a lose-lose situation no matter how you slice it.

As companies continually increase their reliance on the WAN to support critical business processes and initiatives, such as the movement to transform into a digital business, the inability of the network organization to effectively troubleshoot the WAN will increasingly have a negative impact on those critical processes and initiatives.

A Better Alternative

A Global SD-WAN eliminates the problems associated with MPLS and Internet-based WAN options. Aryaka can help you come up with a solution that meets your business’s needs, both now and moving forward.

Read our whitepaper, “MPLS Alternatives: A Definitive Guide” to learn more about the problems with enterprise WAN and what to look for in selecting a better alternative for your organization.

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Why? Because legacy WAN connectivity approaches like MPLS do not address performance challenges for cloud and SaaS applications.

This was not the case 20 years ago.
In the past, these types of applications lived in the corporate data center. All you had to do was deploy MPLS, add WAN Optimization, and you’d be set.

Why doesn’t this model work anymore?
The major limitation of MPLS is that it requires a termination point for access, and you need a WAN Optimization appliance on each end in order for it to provide real application performance improvements. Deploying a device in your own corporate data center is one thing; however, when you’re dealing with cloud and SaaS applications, you cannot control those locations since those environments are hosted by other companies.

Businesses relying on mission-critical cloud/SaaS applications are completely at the mercy of local Internet providers and the congested conditions of the public Internet infrastructure.

So, is there a solution besides hoping that the public Internet will be able to support the performance requirements of cloud-based and SaaS applications? In local regional environments, this may not be the case, but it certainly will become an issue once you traverse oceans and continents.

Latency and packet loss: Public Enemy #1 for applications
The public Internet is prone to high latency and packet loss, which results in poor application performance. Over long distances, high latency can result in employees having to wait several minutes to refresh their screens for business-critical and time-sensitive cloud and SaaS applications.

Latency Fluctuations on Internet from Boston to Shanghai

In addition, packet loss ranging from 10-15% over the Internet is not abnormal between branch offices located in San Jose and China. This results in data having to be sent through the network over and over again. When you add the fact that your data and applications must also traverse a large distance in scenarios like this (latency), employees may have to wait several minutes to refresh their screens.

15-60% Packet Loss on Internet from AWS Beijing to AWS Virginia

For anyone attempting to access mission-critical, time-sensitive applications like Salesforce or SAP Business By Design, this lag in wait time makes the application virtually unusable.

A recent interview we had with Forrester Principal Analyst, Andre Kindness, confirmed these dilemmas, especially when it comes to applications like voice and video conferencing:

“A lot of business professionals are doing voice calls over the internet,” he explained, “But in the world of business where you know packets drop and latency can be an issue, when you are having conversations with people in different parts of the globe, trying to understand those customers, partners, or peers with calls dropping packets and having long delays will make a huge dramatic difference on the business and make it very difficult to build relationships.”

Is SD-WAN an answer?
Edge-based SD-WAN may be an answer for local deployments, but it is definitely not the answer for global ones. SD-WAN is not a new connectivity option; it merely leverages already existing connections, such as the public Internet or a hybrid scenario that includes both the public Internet and MPLS links for specific applications.

A new class of connectivity is required.
To solve global application delivery issues you need a global private network that provides the flexibility of the public Internet and the reliability of MPLS. To that end, we designed Aryaka’s network to be the only global SD-WAN with WAN so you can successfully deliver any application, anywhere in the world. We not only provide secure access to data and applications from the corporate data center, but also to any cloud and SaaS environment.

Global enterprises access Aryaka’s Managed SD-WAN through their local Internet and connect to one of our points of presence (PoPs) around the world. This enables them to be up and running on Aryaka’s private WAN within hours or days, compared to the months it takes for an MPLS deployment.

The network is also layered with WAN Optimization, which helps increase throughput over the network and accelerates applications no matter where they reside and from where their end users access them.

How fast can applications be deployed and accelerated on Aryaka?
One of the major benefits of using Aryaka’s global SD-WAN is that deployment and application performance are dramatically accelerated. We can look to one of one of our customers for an example:

Recently, JAS Forwarding Worldwide, one of the global leaders in freight forwarding and logistics, started using Aryaka to speed up performance and improve the quality of their Zoom video conferencing service for executives and employees around the world.

Using Zoom over the Internet provided challenges for JAS. Their legacy Internet-based network failed to meet quality expectations and resulted in frequent disconnects during video conferencing calls.

Once Aryaka was deployed for Zoom video conferencing by JAS, they saw almost instantaneous improvement in audio and video quality, as well as delivery, over the video conferencing platform globally.

“All it took was a phone call to Aryaka, and within just minutes, the network was up and ready for all traffic from Zoom. We experienced better-than-MPLS video conferencing quality with Aryaka at a fraction of the cost,” said Mark Baker, CIO of JAS. “Not only did end users stop complaining about voice and video quality issues, the usage of the Zoom platform within JAS started to rise.”

The solution for complete application delivery
IT staff might be able to relate to the amount of applications shown above and the difficulty involved to deliver them to end users worldwide with optimum performance. We sympathize with the task they have at hand, which is why we have designed our global SD-WAN solution to resolve these issues in a matter of hours with simplicity never seen before on any network.

We invite you to speak with us or our customers about how Aryaka’s global SD-WAN can help you address global connectivity needs. You can also get started with a proof of concept today.

The post Why MPLS and Cloud Applications Don’t Mix appeared first on Aryaka.

Starting with some perspective on the market, it is predicted that by 2020, 83% of all enterprise applications will be in the cloud. This isn’t surprising – in 2018, 50% of traffic on Aryaka was cloud and XaaS apps and that number is only increasing. The vast majority of prospects we speak to tell us that simplifying their XaaS connectivity for their global locations is a high priority.

Along with cloud migrations, Connectivity, Performance and Scalability to these cloud instances are even more important. Because what’s the point of XaaS if it does not work? Users don’t have time to wait for apps to load – they need XaaS apps to just work. Period.

So what are the options for a global enterprise in the Cloud Era? The three main options are MPLS, DIY SD-WAN and Managed SD-WAN.

With MPLS, you can forget agility and that alone is a major problem. If I was an IT decision maker for a global enterprise, I would not be doing justice to my position or the company I work for by recommending MPLS to the business as the choice for WAN with realities mentioned above.

There is no one MPLS provider who owns networks around the world. Your traffic is bound to traverse a service provider that you have not directly contracted with and if your traffic is differentiated by just a label, is your MPLS network really secure?

The only benefit of MPLS is the guaranteed loss/latency and jitter. They do provide end-to-end management but adding or moving sites can take months. Even simple tasks, such as VLAN changes, can take days or weeks. In a globally competitive world, this option isn’t flexible enough to meet the demands of a dynamic, global business.

Then you have DIY SD-WAN. Do-it-Yourself SD-WAN is not a shared responsibility between the customer, the service provider and the SD-WAN vendor. So when the inevitable problems strike, you are it! You’re left chasing multiple different vendors depending on your number of boxes and service providers. It’s very easy to get caught up in disparate SLAs, technologies and separate support contracts and thus completely miss the bigger vision and scope.

With DIY SD-WAN, operational success is only possible if you’ve thought out everything from security, flexibility, agility and simplicity from the get-go. Otherwise, you’ll have a solution cobbled together with hidden gotchas where you wouldn’t know enough details to predict or know the pitfalls. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a partner with one support contact for all things WAN and a proven track record?

So what are the technical building blocks of application performance? If we start with the technology at the bottom, availability is the foundation where you have SLAs, built-in redundancy and redundancy options. Security should be a consideration from the conceptualization of the solution, including 3^rd party integrations and capacity that directly relates to agility and scaling.

Standing on that foundation, a software-defined platform needs to effectively deliver QoS. For example, in MPLS environments, QoS is enforced only after packet loss. For many users, TCP connections fight each other causing unnecessary loss. If the software-defined platform is just replicating the pitfalls of MPLS environments, then you’ll have the same problems whether you have Do-it-Yourself SD-WAN or not.

Topology is another critical function. Can you directly connect the user to the app in a full mesh setup whether the application is underground, on the ground, in the cloud, in the sky, wherever? Or are you making U-Turns everywhere, or slingshots through hubs and data centers to get to the destination further increasing latency and unpredictability by hopping one medium to the next?

And of course, with data explosion, the global workforce, and “any application anywhere,” patented optimization and acceleration are key to achieving a high-quality end-user experience globally.

Finally comes the process: is it simple and does it allow you to move at the pace of your business?

The technology, process and deployment model all require a solid infrastructure to stand on. Attempting to build a best-of-breed, redundant and multi-provider private network and assume the know-how is equivalent to shooting yourself in the foot for most global enterprises. Stability with respect to packet loss, latency and jitter are a must to enable all of the above. As a network engineer myself, I ask: why take on this massive undertaking that is riddled with gotchas when you can just consume it as a service?

This is where Aryaka, a 100% managed SD-WAN as-a-service, comes into play. There are so many different pieces of the puzzle when digitally transforming your enterprise and IT leaders already have enough on their plates. XaaS got you weary? Accelerate with us!

Watch our recent webinar for a more in-depth look at the Aryaka solution and how we’re helping hundreds of global enterprises accelerate cloud apps by transforming their WAN.

The post XaaS Connectivity Got You Down? There is a Way to Accelerate, Simplify, and Optimize appeared first on Aryaka.

Throughout 2018, many global enterprises turned to networking technologies such as software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) to cost-effectively meet burgeoning bandwidth demands without having to sacrifice simplified WAN management and better application performance.

This trend will continue into 2019 as enterprises with a global presence embrace networking technologies such as SD-WAN as a key tool to leverage the benefits of the cloud and unleash their business’s potential.

As I celebrate my first year as part of the Aryaka team, during which our organisation has welcomed new customers in several sectors throughout EMEA, here are my four top tips to European businesses on breaking down barriers in global connectivity and making the digital transformation of their networks a smooth one throughout 2019.

Navigate the connectivity consolidation of 2019

Acquisitions of SD-WAN vendors spiked over the last 12 months, marked by the purchase of Viptela and Velocloud by Cisco and VMware, respectively.

Now that Oracle has purchased Talari, further market consolidation in 2019 will be anything but a surprise. It will take some digging to differentiate between new players, and the more established service providers, but enterprises will soon realise they need more than what a general SD-WAN box provider offers, and so it will be vital to be able to know the difference.

Though telco providers are more open than ever to offering SD-WAN services in addition to their portfolio, the solutions tend to look very much the same. Providers will need to demonstrate longevity and truly act as a business support function.

Specialist vendors providing a network designed for cloud management and bandwidth scaling will become prized as quality connectivity becomes essential for collaboration over continents.

Vendors with an edge-based solution will fall behind as enterprises become increasingly savvy as to what a quality SD-WAN service should provide.

Our advice? Be sure to understand the difference between network provision and usable bandwidth; not all SD-WAN solutions are equal.

Breaking through digital deadlock

IDC predicts that by 2022, 80 percent of all revenue growth will depend on the move to digital operations. This means global businesses must escape the ‘digital deadlock’ we now see trapping the enterprise between legacy network systems and new connectivity methods. As they struggle to smoothly make the leap, it’s up to providers of new solutions to support these businesses in engineering digital network infrastructure and reconfigure applications.

We especially see this in retail as the sector deals with the rise of online purchasing and an equivalent increase in network traffic.

The best thing businesses can do to address this digital deadlock is to ensure from the start that any new network is capable of scaling on demand and can work in harmony with existing systems during any period of transition.

Say goodbye to MPLS

Speaking of transition, this is something that has been in the telecoms cards for a while now. Despite serving us well for many years, MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS) will finally bid us farewell as a viable business communications solution in 2019. By the end of the year, all forward-thinking businesses will have taken up a network as a service (NaaS) to facilitate growth and have moved into a period of transition with technologies such as SD-WAN.

MPLS providers that recognise the situation will integrate with SD-WAN technologies through partnerships or acquisitions, taking advantage of the fact that many organisations will rely on a transitional period of the two services coexisting rather than an overnight re-haul.

One sign we’re seeing of this is the strategic investment by telecoms companies into SD-WAN, despite SD-WAN services cutting into their MPLS revenue. During a merger for instance, SD-WAN becomes a business enabler, supporting immediate scale and expansion. No wonder merging enterprises increasingly shun the three to six months wait for MPLS lines to be commissioned.

Our advice to support mergers, acquisitions and expansion in 2019: move from an MPLS service to a scalable solution as soon as you can and ask your new service provider for realistic advice on how they will support you through a smooth switchover.

Harness the power of SD-WAN to enable your other solutions

IDC found in June only 35 percent of its European customers currently use SD-WAN technology; 20 percent will adopt the service in the next two years.

We will see many more AI and big data relationships with SD-WAN as customers realise the value the technologies can bring to each other. The relationship between the two is a true marriage; big data is useless if it cannot be analysed whilst AI is somewhat futile if it has nothing to assess. This year we saw security vendors making their way into the space, purchasing SD-WAN as they seek to secure and analyse the data that they collect on the cloud.

The cloud in 2019 will continue to be as important as ever. Aryaka this year celebrates a decade of building private networks that support businesses all over the world to scale and grow. In 2019, the cloud will be the answer to any vendor looking to do the same.

The post The Four Barriers Between Your Business and Global Connectivity – And How to Break Them Down appeared first on Aryaka.

The Modern Advancement of Operational Technology (OT)

Today, however, we are witnessing a convergence between information technology (IT) and the databases and protocols used to collect data, and OT, where the monitoring and controls of equipment can not only be done from a centralized location but can also be managed halfway around the world with the power of the Internet.

This dramatic advancement in machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity and communication has led to data produced by these devices to be collected and analyzed in real time as a means to increase business productivity, enable preventative maintenance, and improve efficiency.

However, OT connected with Internet begins to face some of the same security challenges IT deals with on a daily basis. The difference is that vulnerabilities in an OT system can leave critical infrastructure at risk of sabotage that can result in the failure of a business if not addressed.

Major Trends and Challenges in the Advancement of OT

There are many prime examples of how OT and IT are converging within enterprises today:

• SCADA (Supervised Control and Data Acquisition) is a technology architecture that has combined network data communications used for IT enterprise management into the controllers and devices used within process plant machinery. A single operator is able to monitor and command devices from a single location without the need of being on the manufacturing or process floor itself.

  
  For SCADA systems to work effectively, especially on a global scale, there needs to be a strong networking infrastructure in place providing accurate and effective management of the system.

• The Internet of Things (IoT) is another example of OT convergence. This consists of a network made up of physical objects that communicate with other machines and collect data for efficiency and productivity. Today, IoT is everywhere! It ranges from consumer devices such as smoke alarms to smartwatches, and large enterprises devices in the form of health monitors for the medical industry or traffic flow sensors for manufacturing.

• Sensor data is an integral component of the increasing reality of the IoT environment with almost any business asset capable of being outfitted with a unique identifier (UID) and the capacity to transfer data over a network. However, much of the data produced and transmitted through these sensors is huge. Therefore, collecting the results could be time-consuming depending on the transport.

Global enterprises need to collect this information in real time to develop big data analytics with the potential to deliver significant impact on operational strategy and business value.

Thus, the emergence of Operational Technology into IT infrastructure requires some key major elements:

• A secure, global network with enterprise-grade quality that provides fast and reliable, connectivity worldwide
• Simple and quick deployment of the global infrastructure with on-demand scalability
• End-to-end network visibility from data collection points to the process systems around the globe

And That’s Exactly What Aryaka Provides

Aryaka is uniquely positioned to help companies converge Operational Technology and Information Technology. By allowing seamless, high quality, secure, and accelerated connectivity across the globe. Aryaka creates unparalleled possibilities to remotely monitor and control assets, equipment, and processes in real time. Our unique approach to global connectivity combines secure connections that provide superior performance compared to  MPLS or the public Internet.

Aryaka’s global private network provides Layer 2 full-mesh connectivity built with 30 points of presence (PoPs) around the world. The network is able to bypass the public Internet and eliminate congestion and packet loss, through a secure global transport. It also provides end-to-end visibility on how your data is being transported across the globe from collection points to the processing locations.

We invite you to connect now and give us a try.

And to learn more, download our latest white paper, CIO Solutions for Big Data and Manufacturing.

The post How Global Connectivity Impacts the Convergence of Information Technology and Operational Technology appeared first on Aryaka.

Today’s CIOs face a number of heavy demands in building and managing a network for their global employees. Enabling workers to access cloud applications from anywhere, any time, on any device can be a difficult balancing act to manage.

They need to make sure that application performance levels remain high and overall productivity never suffers, all while making things appear seamless on the front end.

What’s a responsible tech chief to do?

When ‘quick and simple’ is anything but

Everyone loves the accessibility of cloud applications, and CIOs love how quickly they can adopt cloud services. But the truth is, adopting cloud services adds a whole new layer of complexity in managing application performance. It’s easy to miss a lapse in productivity when there’s so much activity going on, and everything is happening in real time.

Whether it’s email or a CRM, load times can vary tremendously, and lags can still occur even after the applications load. The bottom line is that these lapses add up to a significant loss of productivity. Diagnosing these problems isn’t easy because it isn’t always obvious where they are coming from.

Playing the network blame game

Back in the days when IT was predominantly on-premises and applications and workloads were housed in a traditional data center, it was far easier to deal with risk, security, compliance, and network issues. When application performance problems occurred, traditional connectivity options and optimization methods fixed them.

Today, there’s no way to have private lines connecting every cloud data center. There are way too many applications spread across too many places to make that even remotely possible, and most cloud providers probably wouldn’t allow it anyway.

So what do you do when a cloud application is not performing the way you’d like it to? This is where the blame game begins. Your Internet service provider will blame the application provider. The application provider might blame the broadband link. And of course, frustrated employees blame your organization’s IT staff.  No matter who’s to blame, it adds up to the same thing — declining productivity, declining profits.

The real problem is simply this: Every time you take a step into the cloud you have to depend on the unreliable public Internet.

On the one hand, it’s a revolutionary, global connectivity medium that is simple, flexible, and affordable. On the other hand, it is a medium of communication that you are sharing with billions of strangers. It’s unpredictable due to high latency and congestion-based packet loss — especially across long distances.

A better path to the cloud

Before you give up on fully embracing the cloud, there is a way to tackle these performance problems using, of all things, a cloud-based solution.

Aryaka’s global private network places 95% of the world’s business users within 30ms of their applications. Our software-defined, cloud-native private network provides enterprises with accelerated access to any and all cloud/SaaS applications.

While Aryaka’s multi-tenant private network allows global enterprises to bypass the unreliable public Internet, the proprietary optimization software stack provides benefits of TCP optimization, compression, and de-duplication to maximize throughput and performance of cloud-based resources.

Our customers have reported up to 99.99% uptime and bandwidth scaling as well as 40x application acceleration benefits.

Aryaka has helped companies around the world make the most of their cloud applications. Download our data sheet to learn more about how we can do the same for your organization, or continue here to contact us.

The post CIOs: Is the Cloud driving you Crazy? appeared first on Aryaka.

Cloud platforms and SaaS applications have created more connections across diverse locations, and global enterprises are finding that they require a defense in depth security strategy to protect their digital resources. So what strategies using SD-WAN can be applied to maintain best-in class security across a global network?

Lightreading’s SecurityNow recently hosted a webinar with Aryaka and global manufacturing leader, Makino, exploring SD-WAN best practices and essentials for delivering multi-layered, defense in depth security through the network, while also enhancing application performance to improve productivity worldwide.

In this webinar, you will learn about:

• How a global manufacturing leader applied layered security to their network
• Challenges in protecting mission-critical applications for global enterprises
• The importance of deploying multiple layers of security to protect business-critical data
• Integration best practices that provide global enterprises with enhanced security infrastructure and faster application performance

Continue here to watch the webinar now!

The post SD-WAN Security Best Practices for Multi-Cloud Connectivity appeared first on Aryaka.