In the email heard around the enterprise world, Elon Musk declared that ALL employees would return to the office or be fired. Thus, throwing the biggest log yet on a fiery, executive debate that will rage for years.

Has your CEO made the same decree?  Or are you reading this in your pajama bottoms on your couch?

For CIOs and IT teams, the debate opens a more challenging set of questions than wardrobe selection.  Often because the orders from the top are not as black and white.

Are employees heading back to the office?  Yes.

Will employees continue to work remote?  Also, yes.

It’s not as simple as, “Will they or won’t they,” but rather “How many? Where? When?”  And most importantly, “How do I make the employee experience, and the security around it, identical no matter where they work?”

A new dawn is rising

As the dust settles on the pandemic and a new normal seems to be taking shape, CIOs are emerging from their war-time mandates of ‘keep things operating’ to a new set of challenges.  The hasty transformation that was thrust upon them is starting to show its cracks.

• Is the VPN that is hanging together with duct tape and network engineer sweat really a viable, long-term solution?
• Am I going to keep dealing with five different carriers so that I can connect that one office that is occupied for a lunch meeting every other Thursday?
• Will the office in China ever be able to download a 30MB file in less than hour?
• How do I stop the service tickets for Office 365? (Please, JUST MAKE IT STOP!)

While some of the questions are fun to poke fun at, the ramifications are significant.  Especially in the current economic climate.

Tough Times Ahead

The next year for the economy does not look great.  War, oil prices, inflation, interest rates. The list is daunting and it’s looking more and more like we are headed toward a recession.   As a result, board-level calls for both real transformation and financial belt-tightening are being heard far and wide.

The decisions that CIOs make today will literally determine the fate of some organizations’ financial viability 10 or even 5 years from now.  Not because they save 10% on their annual budget (and they will have to).  But because the impact those decisions make on the work experience, and by extension, the quality of employee they can keep in the organization.

Good people just don’t want to work at places that make it hard to do their jobs.

Reframing the Center of the Universe.

The dilemma requires IT leaders to reframe the view of their enterprise world.  In the old days, network and security planning started with where employees were located.  It then extended to the data center.

Now, employees are everywhere.  The data center is the cloud.  And the model breaks.  Trying to conform today’s enterprise network, security, and application delivery to yesterday’s framework is analogous to arguing how the earth is still at the center of the universe.

Reframing the employee experience requires CIOs to start, ironically, not with employees.  Instead, it begins with the applications and services those employees are accessing to do their jobs.

Focusing on delivering those workloads anywhere, securely, is actually the foundation for employee satisfaction.  It’s not foosball or mental health days, but rather just the ability to connect, communicate, collaborate, and build seamlessly.  Effortlessly.

When the focus is on securely delivering any application to any device, anywhere in the world, and making that experience effortless for the employee, the question of whether employees are heading back to the office or not becomes irrelevant.

The post Remote or Not Remote? That’s Actually NOT the Question appeared first on Aryaka.

The enterprise ecosystem has become exceedingly global and mobile over time, while the need for collaboration is stronger than ever. Partners, suppliers and customers have become a part of an integrated supply chain that needs access to these centrally hosted applications from anywhere in the world. As a result, client server access and WAN needs have changed. IT teams are now faced with the unique challenge of making these applications, that have traditionally been behind the firewall, available to public users.

This raises two major issues that must be addressed:

Outside of the Firewall

In some cases, applications can be migrated to the public Internet, and, in those instances, content delivery network (CDN) solutions become a “must have.” CDN solutions provide acceleration for outside-of-the-firewall websites. Traditional CDNs use DNS-based load balancing and edge caching to provide an optimal experience for static websites. However, as dynamic applications have become more common, the need for next-generation CDNs has intensified. For a next-generation CDN to solve the problems raised by dynamic applications, it must provide additional features like stable middle mile performance, end-to-end bi-directional traffic acceleration, and optimization for non-HTTP applications.

Behind the Firewall

Applications that sit behind the firewall for security reasons have remained stuck in the 90’s. The standard practice is to setup a VPN concentrator and have the end users securely access their critical applications via VPN. This approach suffers from the same problems that plagued the web sites in the 90’s: slow performance over large distances when using the Internet.

This is because the middle mile over the Internet is a shared medium. And even though its availability within a region may be plentiful, across peering points and during rush hour there is still tremendous congestion, packet loss, and poor performance. Poor application performance, especially in the enterprise space, results in low adoption rates and lost productivity.

One option enterprises have turned to is the deployment of multiple VPN concentrators. But this method adds layers of complexity and cost, harkening back to the era where web sites deployed web servers in every region.

Instead of deploying tens of concentrators around the world, the ideal solution is to provide optimal performance and connectivity to a centralized VPN concentrator. This can and must be achieved by next-generation dynamic CDN solutions.

Requirements for a Remote Dynamic Content Delivery Network Solution

If you are looking for an ideal solution for delivering dynamic application acceleration to remote and mobile users, consider the following issues before making a decision:

• Are your users regional or truly global, with a footprint into the Americas, Asia Pacific and Europe? If global, the best solution is one built over a dedicated private network, to completely bypass the unreliable public Internet for IP application delivery. This would enable end users to experience stable latency and consistency in application performance.
• For dynamic applications, ensure that the solution includes intelligent features like TCP optimization and persistent connection capabilities to provide acceleration benefits.
• Ensure the solution is application agnostic and not limited to only one or two applications like SSL VPN, as some vendors provide other possible use cases like Citrix, FTP server and RDP.

The First Clientless SD-WAN: SmartACCESS

As of now, there is only one such next-generation solution on the market. Aryaka’s SmartACCESS is the first clientless SD-WAN solution with built-in dynamic CDN. It delivers:

• Up to 3x faster application performance for remote and mobile users
• Consolidated and simplified VPN infrastructure
• Enhanced security and visibility of all remote and mobile user activity
• Global deployment in hours, with the ability to scale in minutes

Aryaka SmartACCESS: The First Clientless SD-WAN for Remote Access

The SmartACCESS service is built over Aryaka’s global private network, which enables remote and mobile employees to bypass the unreliable public Internet.

SmartACCESS uses dynamic CDN capabilities in the following ways:

• Global Load Balancing: Remote and mobile employees can use a single domain name to connect to the VPN concentrator (and corporate resources) without having to change local VPN settings or worrying about where they are.
• Dynamic IP App Acceleration:
  • SmartACCESS accelerates all IP-based (HTTP and non-HTTP) traffic to global users. The acceleration is application agnostic.
  • It includes TCP Optimization, which speeds up application delivery through more aggressive TCP transfers, improving congestion control and congestion avoidance.
• Intelligent DNS-Based Routing: Mobile and remote employees automatically get directed to the most optimal POP for the best application performance.
• Clientless Mobile Acceleration:
  • The end user doesn’t need to go through additional security hoops, as SmartACCESS works in the background. This also prevents user error.
  • There is no need to deploy multiple VPN concentrators or load balancers, significantly reducing your IT department’s global hardware and software investment.
• BYOD Support: SmartACCESS works with all devices and operating systems.

Your remote and mobile workforce, as well as customers, partners, and suppliers, deserve the same quality connectivity that you provide for your employees in branch offices or at your headquarters. And now you can provide it with SmartACCESS, the first clientless SD-WAN that allows you to optimize your network for dynamic content over VPN.

To learn more about SmartACCESS, download our latest data sheet.

The post How to Accelerate Remote Access with CDN Technology appeared first on Aryaka.

Slow access, frequent disconnects, and poor application performance are the constant complaints from end users to network/IT admins, and something that bodes poorly for productivity and success of the organizations to which those end users belong.

In today’s global business landscape, remote access to data and applications from anywhere in the world is a critical tool. The rise of a remote and mobile workforce means more employees are capable of accessing company information while on the road and away from the corporate headquarters or branch offices. Global enterprises are also partnering with companies in different geographies to outsource or optimize business processes, and they need those employees and partners to access corporate applications in remote locations as well.

Where Do VPNs Fail?

Remote access methods like VPNs can fail in a number of ways: They may be very slow, or they may time out. Users may be able to access the network, but find that download/upload times are excruciatingly long or have much worse performance than they would expect if they were in the office.

The fundamental problem is the Internet.

VPNs leverage this public network of networks, which has multiple bottlenecks. Like a public highway, the Internet can become congested at peak times, causing slowdowns and standstills. If you are at a long distance from your end-point, it will take you longer to get where you’re going, especially if you have a lot of data to deliver.

The unpredictable variation in latency (along with high latency), means that slowdowns in speed and performance of applications are almost inevitable. The Internet is also a lossy network, where congestion along the highway leads to packet loss, continued slowdown, and poor application performance.

How Do Companies Currently Solve VPN Problems?

The current methods for solving poor remote access performance are costly and/or ineffective. For example:

• Wait to get Better Network Access
  When remote and mobile users experience slow VPN performance, they might just wait to get network access thinking that the Internet on the last mile may not be good enough. The wait is often futile as the problem lies in the middle mile.
• Deploy Multiple VPN Concentrators
  When companies have a pressing need to scale, they turn to the IT team to deploy multiple VPN concentrators all over the world. This complex solution is costly and hard to manage, which introduces new problems that will hinder the success of your deployment.
• Use Alternate Methods
  Some workers attempt to work around VPN issues by simply sending emails and asking others to deliver messages and files. This can lead to miscommunication and loss of information.
• Use Shadow IT
  The point of using VPN is to keep information safe. When VPNs fail, some workers upload files and attempt to access information through cloud applications like Dropbox, which are not authorized by the enterprise. This is a huge security risk, as well as a lack of compliance.

A Solution for Today’s Remote Access Performance Needs

Aryaka’s solution, SmartACCESS, solves the challenges of slow and unpredictable VPN performance by taking the Internet out of the equation.

SmartACCESS is the first clientless SD-WAN for remote access. It is the only solution that combines dynamic CDN capabilities with SD-WAN technology to deliver reliable, fast and predictable remote access anywhere in the world. Delivered as a cloud-based service, enterprises can deploy it in hours and scale in minutes.

Aryaka SmartACCESS combines dynamic CDN capabilities with SD-WAN technology to deliver fast and reliable application performance anywhere in the world for remote and mobile employees.

By building our own private network of 28 points of presence (PoPs) around the world, we’ve put 95% of the world’s business users  within 30ms or less from the closest end-point. These PoPs are fully meshed into a fully managed global private network.

This private network, which also can be optimized for faster application performance, bypasses the latency and packet loss issues experienced on the public Internet and replaces the need for your in-house IT team to deploy and manage multiple concentrators.

This makes your applications fast and predictable, and supports all those who require access to your corporate network– no matter where in the world they travel and work.

As a clientless solution it also allows enterprises to continue using their existing VPN technology without disrupting security models, enabling global business and expansion initiatives immediately. It supports all corporate applications, including on-premises and cloud/SaaS applications that can be backhauled over a data center connected by secure networks.

SmartACCESS enables IT to realize the full benefit of their VPN investment and ensures a more productive remote workforce.

Stop hating your VPN and start working smarter with Aryaka’s SmartACCESS. Learn more in our datasheet here.

The post Hate Your VPN? <br/>How to Improve Application Performance for the Remote and Mobile Workforce appeared first on Aryaka.

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

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

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

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

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

The post Survey Says: Hybrid Work Environments are Here to Stay and Aryaka Customers are Ready appeared first on Aryaka.

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

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

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

Not a Panacea After All

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

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

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

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What is an Enterprise VPN?

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

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

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

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The Fully Managed Enterprise VPN Service

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

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

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

What Should Enterprises Consider Before Selecting a VPN Service?

Here are a few pointers to keep in mind:

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

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

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

Cloud-First vs Cloud-Only VPN Model.

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

They are not the same.

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

Scalability Is the Key

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

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

Centralized Management for VPN Deployment

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

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

Integrating VPN & SASE for More Security

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

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

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Aryaka VPN Solutions for Enterprises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lockdowns, quarantines, self-imposed isolation, restructuring business for online platforms, and remote workers — COVID-19 has had enterprises participate in the biggest remote work experiment in human history.

Now, more than a year into the pandemic, we are in a relatively better position to gauge the impact of remote working on how we communicate, connect, and create. This raises the obvious question — is remote work here for the long haul, or was it merely an experiment?

I’ll let the numbers do the talking. According to McKinsey, 80% of people enjoy WFH. Besides, 41% feel more productive than before, and 28% are as productive. Irrefutably, the freedom to let employees work from a place of convenience is one of the most desirable benefits an employer can offer in 2021.

Modern-day CIOs want to leverage this flexibility as a catalyst to reinvent the future of work and make things better than they were, rather than use it as a band-aid to keep the lights on.

Investing in remote working capabilities also gives enterprises a safety-blanket to weather whatever life throws their way. But the ‘unknowns’ make rethinking the future of work critical.

The Bane of Remote Work

Take a step back and contemplate how much of your work and life rely upon the public internet. It’s overwhelming, to say the least. In fact, it won’t be an exaggeration to say that you are more likely to be a victim of a cyberattack than witness a physical break-in. Needless to say, your productivity is directly proportional to the quality of access to the internet, which comes with two major challenges.

Application Performance

According to Gartner polls, 54% of HR leaders say that poor technology and tech infrastructure is the most significant barrier to remote work. While enterprises are equipping their employees for remote work and leaning on cloud technology to do so, many are running headfirst into brick walls.

Cloud technology is grounded in connectivity, and when you depend on a public network to run these remote desktop applications, unstable latency, packet loss, and other performance degrading factors are bound to cause road bumps and derail the entire plan.

Security

The digital revolution in response to the coronavirus crisis has paved the way for new security vulnerabilities. According to Cybercrime Magazine, 2021 might witness a ransomware attack every 11 seconds. Twice of what it was in 2019 (19 seconds) and nearly four times of what it was in 2016 (40 seconds), landing a financial blow of almost $20 billion in 2021. That is equivalent to the economy of a small country. It stands to reason that having secure access to the company’s network is of prime importance.

The VPN to the Rescue

The massive 124% uptake in VPN services in the pandemic’s wake suggests how enterprises turned to virtual private networks to provide employees outside the traditional enterprise perimeter with secure and reliable access to corporate networks.

However, prior to the pandemic, business VPN was not so mainstream and attracted very limited investment. These VPN solutions were functional but could only enable a small portion of employees to work remotely. As remote work took center stage and the number of VPN users quadrupled, these existing solutions struggled in terms of flexibility, application performance and often fell prone to security issues as well.

So what are the limitations with the two most widely used models to access VPNs?

On-Premises Architecture

This one has been an enterprise staple for years. While it did a fair bit to help businesses, the architecture is still very on-premises centric. The core enterprise infrastructure is treated as the center of the universe and all the user traffic is funneled through it.

While backhauling may work for a site-to-site VPN, it doesn’t sit well with SaaS, IaaS, and other cloud-based network traffic. Moreover, the performance and security challenges of traditional VPNs are well recognized and documented. They were simply not designed for today’s distributed and dynamic cloud-based environments.

Cloud-Only Architecture

In this setup, users basically go for the architectural gamble that internet connectivity will always remain stable and predictable enough to provide a pristine user-experience. But both of these models take a very one-sided approach to solve the problem. The assumption is that all of your applications are either on the cloud or residing on-premises in the company’s data center. The lack of predictability of the application experience and performance is the biggest drawback here, as there are no guaranteed SLAs.

Given that a hybrid workforce is the new normal, such disjoint solutions do not cut it. What you want is a solution with a unified architecture that brings everything under one umbrella.

The Future of VPN Solutions

Aryaka SmartSecure Private Access enables optimal support for the hybrid workforce, irrespective of whether the resources are hosted on-premises, in the cloud, or accessed from the most far-flung locations.

Our flexible consumption model lets users dynamically relocate their subscribed bandwidth between branches, cloud instances, and remote users. Essentially, the branch offices and remote workers are merged into a single-unified architecture.

How Does It Work?

Every Aryaka PoP act as a Private Access instance, serving as a remote access VPN gateway for the users. When it comes to performance, the VPN traffic from a remote user, upon terminating on the PoP, gets the same treatment as the traffic coming from a regular on-premises user.

The traffic traverses over the Aryaka global L2 optimized core, leveraging all the optimization benefits before reaching the destination. We had some of our users from Beijing download a 100 Mb file from their Azure instance in Western Europe. They witnessed up to 400% performance improvement over the Aryaka backbone compared to an internet IPSec tunnel.

The Security Piece

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

So how does our solution keep up with the security requirements?

Aryaka SmartSecure Private Access integrates with Check Point CloudGuard Connect at the Aryaka PoP, optimizing and securing all the traffic that lands on it. We have integration with leading security solution vendors such as Palo Alto, Zscaler, Check Point, and Symantec to address branch-office security.

While all this may come across as too many moving parts, it comes to the users as an end-to-end managed service, hiding all the complexity, and allowing them to reap the benefits of a truly converged architecture.

Learn how Aryaka VPN enables your hybrid workforce.

Are you contemplating the ROI on such investment? Read SD-WAN ROI white paper.

Looking for step-by-step guidance to fuel your hybrid workforce plan? Reach out to us and we will be happy to help.

The post VPN Remote Access: Navigating The New Normal appeared first on Aryaka.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Video conferencing remains at an elevated high level

Video collaboration traffic (i.e., 8×8, BlueJeans, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and more) transported across the Aryaka’s global core in order to guarantee a superior end-user experience remains at a historical high since the start of the enforcement of the shelter-in-place ordinances. While we have heard that many other enterprises have asked their remote employees to now avoid video conferencing at large in order to protect their VPN infrastructures and the resulting degraded user experience due to traffic overload, clearly Aryaka enterprise customers found that their infrastructure proved resilient as it handled the new video communication traffic loads.

2. More high-tech workers have left the campus

The graph at the left is the WAN usage profile of a US West Coast Software company. Campus traffic has further wound down now that 100% of the employees are in their 5th week of working from home. Aryaka’s Cloud-First SDWAN enables this company to pivot from working from the campus to the home instantly.

3. Knowledge workers remain working from home

The graph below is from a Fortune 100 company using Aryaka’s Secure Remote Access solution for their remote users, which now in the USA accounts for basically 100% of their workforce. Since the end of February, their mobile usage jumped by almost 3X as COVID-19 made its way around the globe. But, note that in the case of this company, with a very significant user base in China, the situation in China is now seemingly slowly returning to normalcy, reflected in both the bandwidth and user numbers working remotely that have started to decrease.

4. Some employees have shifted their activities and priorities

The chart of the company below shows a significant drop-off in the number of change and modification requests handled by its engineering team. One hypothesis could be that this is pointing at a profound shift in the mix of activities pursued by the engineers in this company. Perhaps instead of chasing daily operational issues, there may be currently more time to figure out longer-term strategies and learning.

5. Manufacturing companies just keep humming

Dozens of manufacturing companies continued to show mostly flat WAN traffic over the last couple of months. These companies have built a resilient global network infrastructure, leveraging Aryaka’s Cloud-First WAN, which just keeps humming and prevents disruption. We observed this trend several weeks ago, and we are glad to observe these companies continue to operate without any disruption to their usual traffic patterns, quite possibly indicating their business has not been impacted.

6. Some companies remain shutdown

7. We are working more, even during weekends

Aggregated traffic levels on Aryaka’s private core remain dramatically higher, although growth as clearly leveled off. As reported by several recent articles, we are working more hours and during weekends, and all probably have firsthand experience with trend.

Rethinking disaster preparedness will require networks built for change

We are always in constant, close communication with our customers in order to do all we can to help them out and optimize our service to them over the last months. We have observed various approaches to how companies are dealing with enabling their home workers. There is a mixture of strategies such as traditional VPNs, Cloud VPN Services, more SaaS, and increased use of VDI. Many companies have realized that a proper disaster recovery plan going forward must include the ability for 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 have now sometimes reduced video quality amid this crisis to reduce the strain on the Internet.

The challenge is that most companies cannot afford to keep alternative, dual high-performance private WAN networks up and running for both corporate sites and the remote workforce. Aryaka provides the ability to elastically 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.

As we are talking about traffic trends: make sure to tune into our State of The WAN 2020 Webinar

The post 7 WAN Insights: How COVID-19 Changes Enterprise Network-Traffic-Patterns (Update) appeared first on Aryaka.

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.

The post 6 WAN Insights: How The Global Pandemic Changes Enterprise Traffic Patterns appeared first on Aryaka.

In the current environment, many companies are mandating people to work from home in the Asia Pacific Region. In this digital age, working from home is a normal phenomenon. Thanks to Virtual Private Network (VPN) solutions, you can securely connect from your laptop to the corporate network and have access to the business applications to perform your work. The expectation from the remote workers being fully productive using VPN is no different than any employee working from the office.

Most of the companies offer some type of remote VPN solution but they were never designed to scale for the present situation when all the employees in the region are working remotely. As a result, VPN servers are getting overloaded with the number of connections and amount of throughput required to support such a large workforce. To mitigate the scale issue, enterprises are having remote users in the APAC region connect to VPN servers in EMEA or North America.

Even though these remote users can connect to globally dispersed VPN servers to access business applications, the user-experience is poor because the transport is across the long-haul public internet. The internet, especially across long distances, suffers from high levels of packet loss as well as increased latency and jitter. The users will experience quality issues with business applications and productivity will suffer. IT teams also lack visibility into the network since traffic is traversing over the public internet. Without that visibility, application performance challenges become difficult to monitor or predict, and hard for the network administrators to troubleshoot as they end up working with multiple providers to resolve the connectivity and performance issues.

Aryaka’s Secure Remote Access (SRA), part of Aryaka SmartSecure, offers a unique solution which can significantly improve any existing remote VPN solution deployed by the customer. It provides Aryaka’s global private backbone network for remote users to connect to any corporate VPN server in the world. This makes the existing VPN solution easily scalable for the customers. With Aryaka SRA deployed, IT can easily manage the entire workforce of a specific region using remote VPNs.

As you can see from the diagram below, remote VPN users from the APAC region can connect to the VPN servers in other regions in two ways:

1. Over the public internet. Here, the traffic will be going through multiple providers in different countries until it finally reaches to the VPN Server. This is the un-reliable path with connectivity and latency issues impacting the access to the business applications.
2. Over the Aryaka Private Core Network. With the Aryaka SRA solution deployed, the traffic from the remote VPN user will be rerouted via the nearest Aryaka PoP from the client. It will go through the private core with guaranteed SLAs and will exit from the PoP nearest to the VPN server. In addition, IT will now have additional visibility when traffic is routed via this path via the Aryaka customer portal (MyAryaka).

When using the Aryaka SRA solution, the client experience will be very similar as if the VPN server is in the same region as the end user. This will provide the scale to meet the demand for having remote VPN access to all the employees working from home.

What is required to turn on the Aryaka Remote Access solution?

The solution is very simple, and Aryaka can turn it on for you in minutes. It doesn’t require you to deploy any hardware or software.

Here are the steps to enable the service:

1. The customer provides the domain name or IP addresses of all VPN concentrators that have to be accelerated over Aryaka’s network.
2. For each VPN concentrator, Aryaka’s provisioning team will provide customers with a Canonical Name record (CNAME).
3. The following changes are required on the customer VPN:
   1. Change the DNS record for the VPN domain to use the Aryaka provided CNAME.
   2. Alternately, if you only want to accelerate a select set of remote users connecting to a VPN concentrator, you can change the VPN client settings to use the Aryaka provided CNAME.

Once the solution is implemented, customers will have access to the MyAryaka Cloud Portal which will give them complete visibility to their VPN connections and observed latency going through the Aryaka private core.

Here is a sample graph from the customer portal on Connection Setup Time.

In the above example, the connections to the VPN concentrators are accelerated via the private backbone. In some instances, you can notice that the normal latency due to distance between the client and server could be as high as 500 msec, but Aryaka is reducing the connection time by half and the remote user will see the benefit of switching from the internet to Aryaka right away. There are additional stats available on the portal which can help IT go deeper into any connection if they need to troubleshoot connectivity issue.

With Aryaka SRA deployed in minutes, remote workers will have a significantly improved user experience resulting in productivity and IT meeting the business continuity plan.

The Offer

For a limited time, Aryaka is offering a special offer that includes a free VPN concentrator domain license with new qualifying purchases of the Aryaka SmartSecure Remote Access solution (promotion valid until Apr 30 for both new and existing customers). This will allow enterprises to quickly and efficiently support the needs of their remote workers – and have then up and running in a matter of minutes or hours!

Contact us for more details on this promotional offering.

The post Announcing a Business Productivity Solution for the Global Telecommuter Enabled by Aryaka’s Secure Remote Access appeared first on Aryaka.

‘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.

The post Big Red and Big Teal: Aryaka Oracle Cloud Integration appeared first on Aryaka.

The WAN wasn’t built in a day – but you’d think that SD-WAN providers would have at least spent some time considering how to build one of the most important pieces of the WAN into their cloud strategy: remote access.

Two major trends in business development have made remote access a non-negotiable for the enterprise WAN: globalization and BYOD/telecommuting.

Globalization

Metaphorically, the globe has become a lot smaller, as businesses expand across oceans and continents and even into remote and developing areas – but physically, the world remains large. And that largeness affects application delivery, because latency is a function of distance.

As enterprises adopt a cloud-first approach for applications without first undergirding it with a stable enterprise-grade WAN that is built for the cloud, they suffer from poor global application delivery.

Ask any global business traveler, and they’ll probably tell you that VPN is a nightmare. Getting connected and staying connected is tough even when you’re in the same town as the data center, let alone when you’re traveling overseas or to developing countries and remote areas.

Enterprise remote access solutions don’t, by default, protect against latency or automatically load balance the traffic – instead, IT is burdened with deploying and maintaining multiple concentrators around the world, while end users are forced to guess which connection will be the strongest and most reliable.

BYOD/Telecommuting

There are more mobile devices than there are people on earth, and there’s a good chance that your enterprise end users are trying to access their data and applications on them. While employees still use branch offices, telecommuting and mobile device usage have liberated applications from physical buildings – which poses a challenge for IT.

If the WAN isn’t optimized for mobile application delivery, then business users on the go or at home will lose out on productivity. Additionally, as the workforce spreads out across the globe, they suffer the same issues of latency and disrupted application performance as those employees in remote office locations.

Employers offer telecommuting options to the salesforce and even to other knowledge workers, as it can increase productivity and lower the costs of maintaining a large physical office. Yet these benefits can be offset by lowered productivity from poor application performance and increased costs of maintaining VPN concentrators or purchasing additional hardware.

Make Your Remote Access SmartACCESS

So what is a global enterprise to do when remote access still hasn’t been optimized for the cloud-first era by most SD-WAN vendors?

Ovum recently released a report detailing the challenges of enterprise remote access and suggesting Aryaka’s SmartACCESS, the first clientless SD-WAN for the remote and global workforce, as the solution to those challenges.

According to Ovum, SmartACCESS “addresses the major customer requirements and common challenges with remote access: Simplicity, ease of use, support for various devices and operating systems, and global availability with acceptable end-user performance are part of this offer that includes mobile access.”

You can read the full report here.

For more information about SmartACCESS and to try a proof of concept for your remote and mobile workforce, contact us today.

The post SD-WAN Providers Are Ignoring Remote Access appeared first on Aryaka.