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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Cloud networking at scale is a tough problem for enterprises, big and small. While it is relatively simple to connect between the WAN and a single virtual private cloud (VPC), connecting to multiple VPCs in several regions and branch sites over the WAN is a daunting task. Scaling high-performance connectivity to multiple VPCs in the public cloud with direct access to many branches is amazingly complex.

Aryaka already provides to many enterprise customers a Cloud-First WAN service to rapidly spin up direct connections from Aryaka’s Service PoPs to AWS Infrastructure with the goal of providing WAN connectivity between AWS to workers at home and in the office. This provides enterprises an on-demand SD-WAN infrastructure at a global scale, which is highly flexible while delivering a pristine application performance.

With the introduction of AWS Transit Gateway Connect, AWS and Aryaka have collaborated to increase further the scale of enabling cloud connectivity while further simplifying VPC-to-VPC networking. For Aryaka, the tight integration between the AWS Transit Gateway and Aryaka’s Cloud-First WAN is a natural progression of Aryaka’s solutions for connecting to the cloud.

AWS Transit Gateway Connect was recently announced at AWS re:Invent 2020. I always eagerly look forward to attending this huge conference since it is packed with news and innovations. The 2020 conference, although completely virtual due to the pandemic, was likewise an amazing event with endless announcements. AWS just does things on a large scale. This also applies to its networking portfolio and for connecting enterprises with Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs).

Aryaka Selected as a Launch Partner
We at Aryaka are pleased to have been selected as a launch partner for AWS Transit Gateway Connect and that we have been able to move our Cloud-First WAN to the next level with advanced VPC networking scenarios for our customers. Aryaka is the only managed SD-WAN provider to partner with AWS for this launch. If the AWS Transit Gateway Connect announcement is the cake, the Aryaka Cloud-First WAN solution for cloud connectivity is the icing on top of the cake!

Benefits of SD-WAN Services
Analyst firm Forrester Research notes that companies can improve business agility with SD-WAN services. The report points out that “rightly implemented, SD-WAN can help lower IT costs, improve application performance by load balancing links, and adapt your application traffic pattern to the best available network conditions.” And Forrester identified us as one of the 10 most significant SD-WAN services providers. What makes Aryaka a standout among SD-WAN box vendors and service providers is our unique combination of a fully managed SD-WAN service, based on cloud-first principles and an integrated architecture, tied together with an extensive network of global Services PoPs, and providing a global end-to-end network experience with a single point of contact in more than 100 countries. It is built for scale and offers enterprises agility and simplicity.

AWS Transit Gateway Connect
AWS Transit Gateway has been available for several years. AWS announced enhancements to its Transit Gateway with Transit Gateway Connect, having now the capability to simplify integration with SD-WAN solutions like Aryaka. The ‘Connect’ part is a new attachment type that uses transport attachment options like AWS Direct Connect to permit a third-party appliance to connect to AWS Transit Gateway. This is the first time that AWS is opening up AWS Transit Gateway peering directly with 3rd party solutions.

Doing Things at Large Scale is Complex
The AWS Transit Gateway itself is a superior solution compared to traditional VPC peering and greatly simplifies VPC-VPC networking. AWS Transit Gateway has different attachments like VPC, Direct Connect, and VPN to exchange route information and establish connectivity between on-premises networks and AWS VPCs. Transit Gateway Connect is a new type of attachment that directly allows 3rd party solutions to peer with Transit Gateway over GRE/BGP. For a detailed overview, check out the AWS Transit Gateway Connect documentation.

Scaling Direct Connects with Aryaka leveraging AWS Transit Gateway Connect
Aryaka customers are comprised of large and small enterprises distributed around the globe. One common theme is that many are extensive consumers of AWS cloud services. Atypical use case involves consolidating customer branch networks over a Direct Connect connection to AWS from our POP. Aryaka and AWS are typically co-located or are in very close proximity inside an interconnection provider like Equinix. GRE/BGP tunnels between an Aryaka PoP and the AWS Transit Gateway ride on top of AWS Direct Connect. This new capability helps scale our customers’ AWS connectivity by connecting many branch offices and home workers over a single Direct Connect to multiple VPCs. And we help simplify it.

More Aryaka and AWS Innovations in 2021
Together with our association with AWS, we continue to innovate in the multi-cloud connectivity and the multi-cloud networking space. We are continually increasing our geographic coverage by adding more Aryaka Service PoPs, providing our customers with more on-ramps to cloud service providers such as AWS, and tight integration with security solutions (both on-premises and cloud). And, we look forward to closer integration with AWS with the upcoming launch later in 2021 of our virtual edge appliance (vANAP) that will open up even more cloud use cases for our customers.

Above all, Aryaka is always looking to make life easier and less complex for our customers. Stay tuned, and in the meanwhile, please feel free to contact me at the email below.

The post Large Scale Cloud Networking with AWS and Aryaka Is Now A Lot Easier! appeared first on Aryaka.

APAC’s and China’s #1 Cloud Provider comes together with the World’s Best Managed SD-WAN provider to deliver seamless global connectivity.

We’re excited to announce our latest partnership, one that will redefine cloud access for enterprises globally and accelerate Digital Transformation initiatives. This partnership enables customers across Asia Pacific and in China to extend their reach internationally through Aryaka’s global SD-WAN service, while enterprises outside of the Alibaba Cloud footprint may now leverage Aryaka as an on-ramp to Alibaba Cloud’s innovative services and availability zones.  And, as part of the partnership, China-based enterprises now have end-to-end international connectivity with rock-solid performance guarantees via the Aryaka backbone that integrates SLA-driven connectivity and application acceleration, security, WAN optimization, SaaS application access, last-mile management, and global orchestration.

Aryaka, by working with Alibaba Cloud, now has the most complete multi-cloud footprint of any SD-WAN provider, with direct connectivity to Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle. Alibaba Cloud will also act as a channel for Aryaka’s managed SD-WAN internationally, offering the Aryaka service via the Alibaba Cloud International Marketplace, while Netbank, an Alibaba Cloud partner, will offer the same within China via the Alibaba Cloud Domestic Marketplace. Alibaba Cloud maintains both international data centers as well as those within China, ensuring data residency and security.

Only Aryaka SmartServices SD-WAN for Alibaba Cloud delivers:

Learn more about our partnership.

Join us on July 22^nd for a webinar co-hosted by Alibaba Cloud and Aryaka – https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/17572/423460

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1. Video Conferencing is up dramatically

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

2. High-Tech workers have left the campus

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

3. Knowledge workers are now working from home

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

4. Manufacturing companies just keep humming

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

5. Some companies have slowed or shut down

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

6. We are working more during weekends

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

Disaster preparedness requires WAN networks built for change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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!

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From bandwidth to consistency, there are a lot of reasons why an organization should consider SD-WAN over MPLS or the public Internet. With so many factors to consider, it can be tough to determine which option is going to be the best fit for an organization.

Our State of the WAN report aimed to cut through the noise and identify tangible trends and data that IT leaders can use to make informed decisions for their companies.

From that report, here are the top five reasons why it might be time to consider making the leap to global SD-WAN:

1. Increased Traffic and Volume

The volume of enterprise traffic is growing rapidly across all global regions and verticals. Data is exploding worldwide, driven by Big Data, the Internet of Things (IoT), and video; the proliferation of network-attached and wireless devices; virtualization; and the adoption of both public and private cloud delivery models.

We found that the largest growth regionally in Asia-Pacific and across verticals is in the manufacturing industry. However, it’s only a matter of time before the growth seen here expands to other sectors and other parts of the world.

2. Cloud Takeover

Nearly 50 percent of enterprise traffic is a combination of HTTP and HTTPS as applications move from being hosted on-site to being hosted in the cloud.

No matter how an enterprise might feel about the cloud, it’s no longer possible to avoid it. Employees demand the flexibility of accessing information no matter where they are, and the ability to collaborate with colleagues around the world in a global enterprise.

As cloud applications continue to grow in popularity, it will be increasingly difficult for MPLS to keep up without sacrificing user productivity and satisfaction in the process.

3. Global Bandwidth

This is one area where enterprise WAN is holding up fairly well. Bandwidth at non-headquarters enterprise sites is reasonably good worldwide. Globally, only about 12 percent of global enterprises have links with bandwidth less than 10 Mbps, which is more than a 50 percent decrease from last year.

However, just because something isn’t failing doesn’t mean an organization should accept the status quo. There is always room for improvement. About 25 percent of Aryaka’s customers have one or more 100 Mbps links. Even in developing countries, access-site bandwidth is never below 2 Mbps.

4. Distance and Response Times

As more and more organizations become global, components of traditional enterprise WAN are holding them back from reaching their full potential while conducting business online.

The biggest challenge comes in connecting long distances across the globe. TCP application response times can be as high as 40 seconds and have a variation of nearly 200 percent depending on the distance between the sites.

The problem only becomes worse as the distance increases. This is a trend that’s not going to reverse as more and more organizations become global enterprises.

5. Application Consistency

In some parts of the world, inconsistency in application response times is not solely caused by the sheer distance between locations. The network infrastructure itself also has a role to play.  cannot be solely attributed to the distance between locations but is also dependent on the network infrastructure itself.

This difference becomes apparent in most of the Middle East and some parts of Asia, where the average response time is around 1 second can vary by more than 150 percent.

All of those seconds add up to decreased employee productivity, and the inconsistency can also wreak havoc on an organization’s bottom line over time.

A Truly Global Solution

These trends show that today’s enterprise is encountering major networking and communications challenges as it tries to keep up with the scale and dynamic nature of cloud connectivity, including connecting mobile users across the globe.

Dynamic SD-WAN and SD-WAN NaaS are a way to solve that. Read our white paper on SD-WAN vs. MPLS for more information on the challenges facing global enterprises and how Aryaka’s global SD-WAN can help solve them.

The post Five Reasons Why It’s Time to Consider an SD-WAN Refresh appeared first on Aryaka.

For legacy networks and edge-device providers who still think third-party cloud services are a passing fad, the writing is on the wall. Here are a few key points we discovered from the survey’s findings, and how they will impact the enterprise WAN.

1. Enterprise cloud migration will mean changes to the network
By 2018, large enterprises are expected to reduce on-premises workloads and increase reliance on cloud services.

According to the survey, public and private clouds are expected to gain 20% more enterprise primary workloads. This means private links that led from the branch office or headquarters to the corporate data center will soon become irrelevant or obsolete.

MPLS connections cannot be used for connecting to platforms hosted outside their company’s network infrastructure. Therefore, they must backhaul the data through the corporate data center to the internet and back again. An incredibly inefficient method of application delivery.

Enterprises migrating to the cloud, especially those with global branch offices, will need to look at new forms of network infrastructure to ensure end-users are able to receive fast, reliable, and secure access to growing cloud workloads.

SD-WAN has been looked at by many enterprises as that next step in this transformation, but not all SD-WANs are created equal. The right SD-WAN deployment will provide employees with fast and consistent access to their data and applications, while also reducing network costs for the business.

To learn more, download our latest white paper, “Top 5 SD-WAN Myths: Busted.”

2. Faster Time to Market Will Be a Factor in Cloud Adoption
The movement to the cloud provides an enterprise with the agility to scale at their desired speed. With any cloud platform or SaaS application, an end-user simply has to point straight to the URL and they have access.

Legacy networks, such as MPLS do not have the same agility. They take weeks or months to build and deploy. More importantly, they are not designed for cloud and SaaS application delivery. This undermines the benefits to cloud migration altogether.

Improvements in internet bandwidth and quality have made it more ideal for an enterprise to gain access in regional use cases. However, the internet lacks security, and is not equipped to for cloud and SaaS application performance due to latency and packet loss, especially as data travels across continents and oceans.

Global enterprises will need to look toward private WAN connectivity that is secure, can be deployed as quickly as their cloud and SaaS applications, and enables them to have fast and reliable access to their on-premises, cloud and SaaS environments.

In order to deploy such a network, businesses must look toward SD-WAN providers that have their own global private network, with points of presence located throughout the world. Traffic through a global private network is able to bypass the public internet to avoid congestion and packet loss. This delivers enterprise-grade cloud connectivity to remote employees, partners, and mobile users anywhere in the world.

3. IT Will Move From a Construct to Consume Model
The survey also highlighted the movement enterprises shifting from building on-premises environments to consuming virtualized models over the next three years. This fundamental shift started with data centers and applications moving to cloud, but this in turn changes the needs for an enterprise WAN.

As mentioned before, businesses can no longer wait weeks or months to build out the infrastructure necessary to connect their offices around the world. They need access to connectivity that is already in place and provides them with fast application delivery, in addition to seamless connectivity around the globe.

4. Is Security a Barrier to Cloud Adoption?
One of the main concerns about migrating to the cloud discovered in the survey is that enterprises are wary about the security involved with moving applications and workloads outside the corporate data center.

However, one key capability of an SD-WAN managed service that it owns their private network. They can offer built-in, multi-layer enterprise-grade security: including network security, physical security and access control. This means they can maintain a robust end-to-end encrypted platform to meet internationally accepted security practices.

Managed IT services have key advantages
IT leaders are rapidly adopting managed cloud networking services for their global connectivity needs, including global SD-WAN.

There are numerous advantages with this migration to managed global SD-WAN services.

• Zero CapEx
• Lower OpEx
• Better utilization and focus of IT resources
• Superior network agility
• Faster connectivity to cloud-hosted apps
• End-to-end security.

A global SD-WAN delivered as a managed and integrated service, can have built-in WAN optimization and multi-level security – end-to-end. Cloud apps are accelerated and secured from host to end-user. Enterprises don’t have to buy, configure, deploy, and maintain expensive WAN optimization and security in each remote site.

McKinsey’s findings bring to light many of the issues a global managed SD-WAN service solves, as more applications move from the corporate data center to the cloud. A global SD-WAN service running over a private global network that is purpose-built for small, medium, and large enterprises can provide LAN-like connectivity to applications hosted in cloud services.

If you company is completing a cloud migration, or is in the process of one, we invite you to try a free proof of concept today and see how Aryaka can improve your network today.

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