The world has become much smaller in the past few decades thanks to globalization. Globalization has long been a core driver for digital transformation for enterprises. Connecting offices, factories, and supply chains needs a digital-first mindset and infrastructure. With the pandemic’s end officially declared by the WHO ^[1] and the reopening of China, recent data released by the IMF predicts that Asia is poised to drive global economic growth^[2] .

China, the global manufacturing hub

With its high economic growth over the past decades and the strategic importance of the Chinese market, China remains at the top of the list for companies to expand and invest in internationally. Combined with the massive shift in the production of goods, China has become the dominant country in manufacturing. However, this has come with challenges in navigating the regulatory and technological environment.

Aryaka has held strategic partnerships with leading Chinese data center and telecom providers Alibaba and others to operate our in-country PoPs (Points-of-Presence) in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong to ensure full compliance with all privacy and data security laws and regulations. Our strategic partners and their affiliates comply with all applicable laws and regulations and maintain necessary permits, licenses, and approvals. For years, Aryaka’s customers have benefited from our global HyperScale PoP infrastructure and integrated WAN optimization and SaaS acceleration for reliable and fast connectivity for onsite and remote users. A few examples of how Small-Medium and Large enterprises leverage our SD-WAN and SASE as service solutions are Social Media platform firm KAWO, Logistics company Transitex, Architecture firm Callison RTKL and Chemical manufacturing company Albemarle.

India to challenge China’s dominant position

At the same time, geopolitical changes and the high growth of India’s economy, population growth, and investment in attracting foreign companies to expand into India are a challenge to China’s dominant position in the global market and an opportunity for companies to diversify their footprint. For many years, India has produced world-class business services companies next to network and software engineers. Aryaka has had a presence in India since our founding 14 years ago and operates four PoPs in the major economic hubs of New Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai, and Bangalore. Companies are within milliseconds of one of our PoPs wherever they choose to invest and build their offices and factories on the Indian subcontinent. Premium Sound Solutions has become one of the world’s leading companies in automotive and consumer sound products. PSS operates facilities worldwide, including China, and has a sales office in India. The Belgium headquartered company relies on our managed services to improve Disaster Recovery and network performance.

Top Five Challenges for Connectivity for China and India

China and India together are forecasted to generate about half of global growth this year ^[2] and be critical countries for international companies as part of their future global supply chain and operations. Keeping or developing business operations in each country has huge potential benefits.

However, enterprise network connectivity in China and India presents local challenges, ranging from the availability and quality of Internet connectivity and access to cloud-based workloads and SaaS applications to providing proof of compliance with local regulations. Poor or unstable Internet connectivity often leads to high latency and packet loss, unreliable access to the cloud, and SaaS impedes productivity, while a lack of compliance risks overall business operations and the delivery of network and security services.

Based on our longstanding experience in operating in both countries, we identified five recurring challenges for enterprises to address. I highlight key aspects of each one in this blog, while this whitepaper explores global enterprises’ top five challenges in securely connecting applications and workloads with employees, sites, customers, and suppliers in China and India.

Challenge 1: Application performance

The combination of regular Internet performance issues and high regulatory compliance creates significant challenges for international businesses to connect their users and mission-critical applications.

Aryaka Solution: Several PoPs in key business metros in China and India provide low latency access and dedicated connectivity to deliver on an optimal network and application performance with consistent SLAs.

Challenge 2: UCaaS and enabling global collaboration

The need for communication and collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, Webex, Zoom, and others continues to accelerate globally. Enabling employees to be their most productive and securely connecting them to the enterprise WAN, no matter where they are located, is of the utmost importance.

Aryaka Solution: Our in-region PoP footprint and multi-segment WAN optimizes connectivity to the different UCaaS/CCaaS gateways within China, India, and internationally. Voice and Video traffic is given highest QoS priority with guaranteed bandwidth allocation to meet user expectations for productivity.

Challenge 3: IP-Based applications

Reliable access to websites and web applications is foundational for any enterprise, so IT Ops must know how to navigate China’s or India’s unpredictable Internet. One frequently proposed solution is a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Still, CDNs have issues supporting business application performance and user expectations due to a reliance on the public Internet.

Aryaka Solution: Our global, scalable WAN – based on a single-pass architecture – offers reliable performance and flexibility to support any application IT deploys, including dynamic IP-based applications, versus optimizing for specific content and sources/destinations.

Challenge 4: Remote worker connectivity

Hundreds of millions of employees in China and India, anywhere really, work, at least partially, remotely. The hybrid workplace is here to stay. The mandate for the CIO and IT is to enable these ‘anywhere’ workers with secure and reliable access to the web and corporate applications and workloads wherever they reside.

Aryaka Solution: Our secure remote access solution, Private Access, deployed in all Hyperscale PoPs, including China and India-based PoP delivers flexibility and security. With the aggregation of traffic from branch and remote users and delivery of common services with consistent network and security policies at our scalable PoPs versus a siloed architecture and point solutions, enterprises benefit from our approach.

Challenge 5: Compliance

In addition to relying on the Internet for connectivity, or a legacy WAN architecture from a managed service provider that is not cloud-ready, is less than ideal. And as mentioned earlier, foreign businesses can face complex compliance rules and requirements in India and China. Establishing a local presence, especially in China, can be difficult. Companies must balance legal and technical needs.

Aryaka Solution: Our strategic partners and their affiliates comply with all applicable laws and regulations and maintain the necessary permits, licenses, and approvals to deliver on this requirement. Our global PoP footprint and dual-layer core backbone remove the unpredictable nature of the public Internet.

Aryaka Regional Asia PoP Footprint and Cloud Onramps

We operate a global core network consisting of a dual-layer backbone with PoPs on six continents providing optimal cost and performance connectivity to and from China and India and beyond. Our Network Architecture whitepaper goes into details about the setup of our PoP and global backbone with onramps to hundreds of cloud resources.

In Conclusion

No matter where enterprises set up their manufacturing presence, our longstanding expertise, experience and partnerships in China and India, combined with our global network and security architecture delivered as a managed service, provide enterprises a trusted partner for their SD-WAN and SASE as a service.

Download our paper Addressing the Top Five Connectivity Challenges for China and India to learn more.

[1] https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/05/1136367

[2] https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/05/01/asia-poised-to-drive-global-economic-growth-boosted-by-chinas-reopening

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Aryaka and 8×8: 1+1=3

Industry leaders team to enhance cloud communications performance across SD-WAN

We’re happy to announce our partnership with 8×8 to enhance application performance and accelerate digital transformation by leveraging the combined capabilities of the 8×8 cloud communications platform and Aryaka’s cloud-first WAN. See the common theme?

Both of our companies’ cloud-based services deliver the flexibility, simplicity, and scalability of the OpEx-only cloud consumption model, and Aryaka’s global footprint offers a perfect foundation for 8×8’s UCaaS and CCaaS offerings to achieve peak performance, anywhere in the world. And, both of our companies are acknowledged leaders in their respective spaces, with 8×8 an 8-time Gartner UCaaS MQ leader, and Aryaka both a visionary and a Voice of the Customer for the Gartner WAN Edge MQ. We’ve been working together for a while, and this partnership takes our cooperation to the next level with joint account planning and both sales and partner enablement. 8×8 will also position the joint offering into their channels, many of which are also Aryaka partners.

For those more familiar with Aryaka, the 8×8 enterprise communications platform delivers voice, team chat, meeting, and contact center solutions for enterprises of all sizes and shapes. Our joint customers are provided optimized access to 8×8’s regional Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) Points of Presence (PoPs) by leveraging the Aryaka backbone, eliminating the packet loss, latency, and jitter that can occur using the public internet, impacting cloud communications user experience. Regional on-ramps directly connect Aryaka PoPs to 8×8 services, creating an optimized topology. In addition, customers will benefit from real-time insights into traffic management via the MyAryaka cloud portal that includes monitoring and reporting on 8×8 performance. This, combined with the global orchestration offered by both Aryaka and 8×8, delivers the ‘hands-off’ operation required by IT staff in a world where the one constant is change.

Some direct benefits include better application performance. Enterprises are increasingly reliant on UCaaS to drive efficiency and meet customer demands, even more critical in the midst of the pandemic. They expect high quality communication experiences anytime, anywhere, and on any device. The underlying WAN infrastructure must therefore meet the demands of a flexible and dynamic workforce, while maintaining security and reliability. Enterprise knowledge workers, their customers, and their suppliers don’t want to have to understand the intricacies of the underlying service – they just want it to work! By leveraging the Aryaka backbone, 8×8 customers will not only have optimized performance for their collaboration applications, but also other applications they’ve moved to the cloud.

Learn more about our partnership.

Join us for a webinar
https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/17572/425637

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Considering that we are seemingly plugged into everything and everyone the world-over and just how much of an extension of the business active communication has become, communications technology continues to evolve, whatever the label be. This includes UCaaS, CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) and CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service), with a subset of the vendors outlined in the diagram below.

SOURCE

The days of relying on simple voice and fax to conduct business are clearly long gone. Thanks to globalization, expansion, offshore development centers, international clientele, remote employees and road warriors, effective collaboration is the cornerstone of the modern global workforce, pushing it all forward from one level to another.

it wasn’t so long ago when global mega-corps were shelling out an insane amount of money to pay bills for dispersed communication platforms and applications. Until that is, UCaaS picked up steam as an essential collaboration tool, integrating it all into a single platform and interface. From email, directory services, video conferencing, calls & multimedia to file sharing, instant messaging, collaboration tools and more, UCaaS brought it all under one roof. The result? Enhanced transparency and productivity, fewer mistakes and less lost information.

Fast forward to 2020, and as industries continue to sprint towards moving all or part of their communication tools to the cloud, there is an obvious question to be asked. Is UCaaS alone an elixir for all your communication and collaboration woes? Sadly…NO.

Miscommunicated=Misunderstood

UCaaS’s rising fortunes indicates that the industry solemnly sides with the cloud when it comes to performance, scalability and cost savings. But cloud services come with a condition: they are only as good as the network upon which they are delivered.

While UCaaS relieves in-house IT teams from the cumbersome task of managing on-premise solutions and system upkeep, it raises the stakes for WAN administrators. Because when it comes to real-time communication, the overall user experience, productivity and adoption rate is directly proportional to the robustness of network.

The public internet serves as the default network choice for many, and understandably so. The problem with this approach? Not only is it far from being business-grade, it also does not provide any QoS capabilities for real-time traffic. It might work well across small distances in some cases, but as the distance grows and the traffic traverses through multiple peering internet services providers, the user experience takes a hit. The impact?  Blackouts, pixelated videos, call drops, white noise, garbled audio and everything else in between.

Even over short distances, UCaaS traffic competes for bandwidth with other TCP applications and is subject to the risks of high latency, packet loss and congestion. While UDP traffic can take such variations with relatively minimal productivity disruption, UCaaS handles more bandwidth-intensive flows and any bottlenecks can undermine the quality and availability of services.

Aryaka and UCaaS: Better Together

The limitations of traditional networks can be addressed using Aryaka’s fully managed SD-WAN solution that is designed from the ground-up as a cloud-first architecture, thus reducing the complexity of rolling out a UCaaS solution.

Aryaka sets industry standards for availability, deterministic network behavior and security. Typically, internet quality is considered a design consideration outside the control of the SD-WAN domain, but the Aryaka solution avoids this potential pitfall. Aryaka recognizes and marks UCaaS traffic, steering it optimally and dynamically across hardened internet access links and through the global L2 Aryaka private network infrastructure. The immediate benefits include:

Superior Experience– Quality collaboration sessions using a private network with built-in WAN optimization to minimize jitter, latency, and packet loss.

Guaranteed Bandwidth– QoS for real-time communications, including service prioritization, traffic shaping, and bandwidth reservation algorithms.

Non-stop uptime– Enterprise-grade connectivity to UCaaS platforms through a private network eliminating service interruptions and dropped calls.

Reliable Performance– Intelligent last-mile optimization ensuring reliable voice and video performance to all locations, including those with poor-quality Internet links.

Let Us Help You

Still sitting on the fence about whether to choose Aryaka as your network partner for UCaaS? Read the case study to find out how Aryaka helped a US-based transportation and logistics company improve the performance of their UCaaS solution and initiate a company-wide digital transformation initiative.

The logistics veteran was trying hard to scale these initiatives across branch offices in the USA, Canada and Europe, only to find out that their legacy network was failing to keep up with the requirements of these modern cloud-based applications.

As the company went back to their planning board, they realized it was the network that needed to be modernized first — to get the most out of this initiative. Read how Aryaka helped.

Want to know more? Register for a free demo.

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Enterprises are adopting both UCaaS and SD-WAN solutions at a rapid pace, and many enterprises are adopting both technologies simultaneously. According to Gartner, by 2021, 90% of IT leaders will not purchase new premises-based UC solutions because cloud UC offerings are surging far ahead in terms of features, functions, portals, analytics and dashboards.

As enterprises roll out UCaaS, user experience, availability and security are top priorities. The lack of deterministic behavior in underlying network architectures that fail to take optimal cloud application support into account stand in the way of delivering on those top priorities. Finally, as companies often set out to adopt SD-WAN and UCaaS simultaneously, harmonizing the two technologies can become quite challenging.

So – how do we ensure a consistent, superior user experience? It is hard enough to implement end-to-end network QoS for traditional on-premise Unified Communications. And now we need to consider the cloud on-ramp network QoS over SD-WAN in the equation, as well as monitor the cloud SLAs.

Aryaka’s fully managed solution was designed from the ground up as a cloud-first architecture, thus reducing the complexity of rolling out a UCaaS solution. Aryaka sets industry standards for availability, deterministic network behavior and security. Typically, internet quality is considered a design consideration outside the control of the SD-WAN domain, but the Aryaka solution avoids that potential pitfall. Aryaka recognizes and marks UCaaS traffic, steering it optimally and dynamically across hardened internet access links and through the global L2 Aryaka private network infrastructure.

When it comes to delivering optimal UCaaS performance, these are some key architectural considerations:

• • Latency: In global deployments, especially when covering long distances, some latency is dictated by the basic laws of physics of light traveling over fiber. It takes 200ms to cover the equatorial circumference of 40k kms of our planet over fiber, and there’s nothing we can do about that until there is a potential quantum entanglement breakthrough. At best we can expect up to 20-30ms latency on the last mile links when using hardened internet connectivity. ITU G.114 recommends to keep latencies under 150ms for voice communications – and we have all experienced situations where, due to latencies well over 150ms, participants in a conversation start to inadvertently talk over each other, and initiate the awkward “No you, go … Ok I’ll… oh no… sorry you go…” exchange. We have to be aware that we’ll be running close to this limit when we deploy UCaaS between global locations in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia. So anything the network infrastructure can do to keep things close down to a theoretical minimum latency helps. And Aryaka’s global L2 network is ideally suited to do that.
  • Jitter: We have already established that, as a global enterprise, there’s little we can do to avoid minimum latencies that may hover around G.114’s maximum recommended latency of 150ms as we deploy UCaaS. Because of this, it is imperative we do anything we can to deliver on predicable and low jitter behavior in order to avoid negatively impacting users’ quality of experience and productivity. The basic Unified Communications design rule states that jitter should be under 30ms. Even that may easily push things well over 150ms if you think about the realities of global deployments. Jitter reduction is a key benefit of using Aryaka’s global L2 network. With a global L3 packet infrastructure, there are no jitter guarantees, irrespective of allocated bandwidth pools. But with Aryaka’s L2 infrastructure without oversubscription, strict jitter guarantees can be delivered upon, and over the Aryaka infrastructure we typically see 100% consistent jitter behavior well under 5ms.
  • Packet Loss: Truth be told, voice -unlike some data applications- can tolerate some packet loss, up to 1% being the generally agreed upon standard. The human ear tries to interpolate and make sense of the slightly garbled communication that results from up this 1% packet loss. Beyond that, things become frustrating very quickly (we’ve all experienced those tricky garbled voice or video calls). This happens to be another area where the Aryaka infrastructure excels: we combine a loss-free global L2 core network with edge technologies that can completely eliminate packet loss in the last mile (I’ll refer to my SmartLink blog for an explanation on how we achieve that with a few patented technologies).
  • UCaaS Cloud Peering: This one is simple, but crucially important as you deploy UCaaS. Let’s just say that if you have -I’ll use our own Aryaka example- a marketing team in the US West Coast and one in India, the results if you backhaul both of them to just one peering point to your UCaaS provider in either location are likely to be underwhelming for UCaaS communications (which we use extensively, I can assure you), irrespective of whether you use MPLS or internet. In fact, the latter may have an advantage because the DNS lookup will try to route you directly to a nearby peering point, but you’ll never know and you have little control over that. In the Aryaka solution, we establish VOs (virtual offices) in optimal peering areas to SaaS applications in general and UCaaS partners in particular. This means your business-critical collaboration traffic will always take the optimal route through the Aryaka L2 infrastructure to the best possible UCaaS providers’ peering points.

• Underlay and Overlay Visibility: UCaaS deployment is a posterchild for exposing some of the complications that can arise from many SD-WAN solutions’ tendency to force users to reconcile virtual overlay and physical underlay behavior by looking into different tools, because real-time applications are unforgiving. If voice quality regularly deteriorates, or if you get SIP codes that show sessions regularly fail, what is the reason? Insufficient virtual resources in the virtual overlay? Overloaded physical resources in the underlay? I’ll refer to another blog for this one, suffice to say the Aryaka architecture delivers on the benefits of SD-WAN without impacting consolidated, end-to-end visibility via the MyAryaka customer portal.

To sum it up: By rolling out UCaaS over Aryaka’s 100% Managed SD-WAN, network architects can deliver on the following benefits:

• Optimal peering architecture to leading UCaaS providers’ clouds like RingCentral, 8×8, Microsoft Teams and others
• Optimization technologies that eliminate packet loss and ensure optimal latency and jitter over last-mile internet links for UCaaS traffic
• Deterministic latency over a global infrastructure with virtually no jitter
• Under 30ms of first mile latency to 95% of customers, partners, suppliers and employees
• Complete end-to-end, consolidated visibility into every network performance aspect that influences UCaaS user experience

Aryaka delivers on an architecture that fundamentally simplifies the interaction between its fully-managed SD-WAN infrastructure and UCaaS solution deployments. Aryaka automatically delivers on optimal UCaaS peering points, optimizes the behavior of the last-mile internet connection to the branch and effectively secures the enterprise network. With Aryaka, network managers can rest assured they deliver a superior user experience for UCaaS collaboration tools that boost knowledge worker productivity.

The post Simplifying UCaaS Deployment over SD-WAN with Aryaka appeared first on Aryaka.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Say you’re a US company that has a branch office (or many) in India and you want to be able to communicate with your team. Naturally, your first thought is to use Voice over IP for the flexibility and economy, or, instead of hosting that yourself, signing up with a provider offering Unified Communications as a Service (UCaas).

But you’ll hit a wall after doing just a little research. There aren’t many options, and most all involve Tata, the dominate legacy carrier serving the country:

• UCaaS from Tata. But you have to access the service using MPLS, and it typically takes 6-11 months to get that installed, say nothing of the MPLS expense.
• MVoIP from Tata. Same MPLS requirement.
• MPLS to a UCaaS supplier with a POP in, say, Singapore or the UK, which still requires the MPLS lead time and even more cost since the link is international.

The reason there are so few options is because 1) Tata is so dominant, and 2) India has a lot of regulations about the use of VoIP that are designed to safeguard revenue for the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).

That stymies most efforts to independently embrace VoIP in the country.

Most, but not all.

Aryaka has a compelling story because it offers a Software Defined-WAN (SD-WAN) delivered as a service over a private, global Layer 2 mesh network connecting POPs in India and 27 other global locations. The unique architecture enables VoIP options for both enterprises looking to better serve resources in India and UCaaS service providers looking to ramp up service in India.

Here’s how it works.

To address the government requirement that voice traffic stays on the PSTN, offices there will need an on-premises box that has a LAN connection on the office side and two WAN ports facing outbound, one that connects to the PSTN via a POTS or PRI interface, and the other that supports an IP-Sec VPN tunnel over an ISP link to Aryaka’s closest POP.

The premise box will need to be able to identify VoIP calls that are local and be able to convert them and hand them off for carriage over PSTN to conform to local regulations. The international calls, however, are sent out over the private VPN tunnel to Aryaka’s closest POP.

Once the voice traffic climbs onboard Aryaka’s private, global SD-WAN, it is routed out of the country to either the enterprise’s data center-based VoIP call processor, or to a UCaaS service provider. Either way, it is VoIP from there out, giving you all the advantages and ancillary benefits that come with VoIP, such as easier integration with enterprise applications that can benefit from having voice support capabilities.

And, of course, the fact that the long-haul portion of the VoIP traffic is traversing the middle mile over Aryaka’s optimized, global SD-WAN, ensures that packet loss is minimized, latency is flat, and there is little jitter. That, in turn, makes it possible to use advanced TCP optimization techniques to reduce the numbers of packet acknowledgments required, which increases throughput. Add it all up and you get high-quality voice connections that are clear, go through as expected, and don’t unexpectedly drop.

What’s more, with Aryaka, you can get VoIP up and running in a matter of hours or days, not the months required by using the MPLS-based VoIP “answers” from the legacy supplier.

If you don’t like the idea of adding an appliance in your India locations, optionally you can route all your traffic out to Aryaka’s POP and have local traffic hairpin at an offshore VoIP call processor (Singapore, for example) and come back into India over Aryaka and dump into the PSTN.

The main takeaway here is that there are more VoIP options for your India locations than first meets the eye. What’s more, the options are better:

• You can turn up service in a fraction of the time it would take you to get the MPLS circuits needed to support the legacy provider’s VoIP service
• The unique attributes of Aryaka’s network ensure the best possible voice service quality
• And all your traffic is transported locally over encrypted IP-Sec VPN tunnels, meaning it is virtually invisible to prying eyeballs

So, whether you’re looking to extend your enterprise VoIP network to India, or using a UCaaS service provider to support your locations there, take a look at the way Aryaka enables more VoIP options than the local supplier.

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Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) is an increasingly popular way to bundle the most critical communications and collaboration tools into one full-function platform, but if you have used UCaaS to support customers and partners overseas, chances are you have experienced:

• Poor quality voice connections
• Dropped calls
• Faltering video links
• General frustration

UCaaS typically combines Internet-based calling, video conferencing, messaging and collaboration tools, but UCaaS’ reliance on the public Internet can be problematic.

In a given region of the US where the Internet connection quality is dependable, standard UCaaS might suffice. For organizations with overseas operations, the Internet will involve a patchwork quilt of service providers and the inevitable network congestion, dropped packets and latency will greatly degrade the user experience.

That’s why Aryaka recently partnered with 8×8 Cloud Communications to deliver a truly differentiated UCaaS experience, a service that provides unparalleled voice and video quality for global organizations.

The partnership combines 8×8’s Cloud Communications UCaaS offering with Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN, providing the best of both worlds. All of the voice, video and data tools bundled into 8×8’s UCaaS platform ride Aryaka’s global private network instead of getting shunted off to the best-effort public Internet. Voice, video and data are optimized for global transport and user experiences rival those of domestic, regional connections.

Earlier this year, Platform Specialty Products deployed the combined 8×8-over-Aryaka solution to improve communications and collaboration capabilities for employees.

“Prior to deploying 8×8 and Aryaka, our remote locations experienced WAN performance issues, including dropped calls when attempting to connect to offices around the world,” said Dustin Collins, Vice President of Global Infrastructure Services at Platform Specialty Products. “Post deployment, Platform Specialty Products no longer experiences dropped calls, and voice quality has improved immensely. As a result, our team is more productive and less frustrated. With such noticeable improvement in network and communications quality, we’re looking to implement the solution in several locations in Latin America and Asia.”

The combined solution from Aryaka and 8×8 delivers the promise of UCaaS for global organizations, optimizing and securing your critical voice and video communications over a private WAN backbone. Now you consume the offerings as services, relieving you of the need to build and manage your own infrastructure.

The promise of the UCaaS, Cloud & SaaS delivered to your door – Aryaka. Download our free data sheet, to learn how Aryaka and 8×8 can enhance your international communications.

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