Greylock Partners Identify “What Keeps CIOs Up At Night”

According to a recent survey from Greylock Partners, one of the leading venture capital firms, one of the top issues keeping CIOs up at night is the migration of traditional applications from the corporate data center to the cloud.

The Migration Frustration
When applications migrate to the cloud, the servers they were hosted on migrate from corporate data centers to those managed by SaaS providers. This significantly limits corporate IT’s ability to manage and improve application performance.

Blame the Network!
The network and tools used for accelerating applications in the corporate data center become borderline useless in this migration. This can become more than just an IT issue when mission-critical applications begin to suffer.

Let’s examine this further:

Networks in the Pre-Transformation World
When application servers were located in the corporate data centers, IT could either use the public internet or private network connections to deliver a consistent user experience.

WAN Optimization appliances would then be added to further improve application performance. This kept the realm of control in the hands of corporate IT departments.

SaaS Over the Public Internet
With the SaaS model, application servers are located at the provider’s data centers with thousands of corporations connected to them via the public internet. This leads to a slow and inconsistent performance due to high network congestion and latency. The most impacted are remote geographies in Europe, the Middle East, and China.

Poor application performance translates into lost productivity, customer and partner dissatisfaction, and potentially lost revenue and business opportunities.

MPLS: The Network of the Yesteryear that Doesn’t Match Up
While MPLS worked reasonably well for many on-premises regional applications, cloud-enabled and SaaS applications do not perform well over these connections. The reason why is corporations can’t deploy direct MPLS links from their offices to SaaS vendors.

How About Hybrid Networks?
Hybrid networks and edge-based SD-WANs do not address the issue either. They simply combine the public internet and MPLS, and inherit the issues mentioned above. Their combination has little control over the internet’s thousands of separate networks put together with typically oversubscribed peering relationships. These choke points cause network delays and bottlenecks in application performance, which also slows productivity.

To summarize, legacy networks such as MPLS and Hybrid WANs are completely mismatched when it comes to meeting the modern requirements for cloud-enabled and SaaS applications. They were simply not designed for access to these systems with the performance necessary to conduct business at today’s pace.

Modern Applications Require a Modern Global Network
To address the unique requirements of IT organizations undergoing the transition from data centers to the cloud, the network needs to have the following characteristics:

• A global network with MPLS-grade quality to provide fast and reliable connectivity worldwide
• Accelerated access to every SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS platform
• WAN optimization layered on top of the network to increase application performance for end-users around the globe
• SD-WAN functionality to reduce complexity and cost
• Simple and quick deployment with on-demand scalability for faster project implementation

What Makes this Possible: Aryaka Global SD-WAN
Aryaka has pioneered the global SD-WAN, a unique approach to the connectivity requirements of SaaS and cloud-enabled applications for enterprises with a worldwide presence. It combines better-than-MPLS connectivity, the speed of WAN Optimization, and the simplicity of the Internet.

How Does It work?
Our global private network was built with a full-mesh connectivity and 26 points of presence (PoPs) around the world. The network is able to bypass the public Internet and practically eliminate congestion and packet loss.

Within that network, we have built WAN Optimization to accelerate application performance for end-users around the globe. It is delivered as a service, so you don’t have to buy, configure, deploy, and maintain expensive WAN Optimization boxes in every single location. This approach delivers cloud and SaaS applications to global end-users as if they were living in the local corporate data center.

Deployed by over 500 Enterprises Around the World
Aryaka’s global SD-WAN has been deployed in some of the largest enterprises in the world, covering 63 countries. Businesses use Aryaka as the go-to network to improve their global connectivity and application performance, especially with branch offices across remote geographies.

• Consumer electronics giant, Skullcandy, replaced their MPLS connection with Aryaka’s global SD-WAN. They saw the performance of their cloud-based ERP, SAP Business ByDesign, improve up to 10x for their global offices.
• JAS Forwarding Worldwide, a global logistics corporation, implemented Aryaka global SD-WAN for their 240 offices worldwide to connect to their SaaS application, CargoWise One. Their employees around the world were now able to collaborate in real-time.

The Solution for CIOs Worldwide
Greylock’s findings clearly highlight the issues Aryaka was designed to solve for CIOs. As more applications migrate from the data center to the cloud, Aryaka has built the connectivity for modern enterprise requirements, helping CIOs around the world sleep easy.

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