Winter is Coming
“Thousands of years ago, there came the long night that lasted a generation. Kings froze to death in their castles, same as the shepherds in their huts; and women wept and felt the tears freeze on their cheeks. In that darkness the White Walkers came for the first time. They swept through cities and kingdoms, riding their dead horses, hunting with their packs of pale spiders as big as hounds.”
The fifth season of Game of Thrones might be over. But the threat of winter still hangs over the necks of the folks of Westeros like a broadsword. In Game of Thrones, winter signals danger, so much so that a huge wall has been built to keep out the threats winter brings with it.
In a similar vein, network outages and downtime represent winter in the minds of CIOs around the globe. And Network Managers are like watchers on the wall, keeping an eye out for the first sign of trouble, because if your network goes down, you know the result won’t be good.
The dependence of enterprises on their networks only increases as employees, customers, and partners become more globally distributed. Network performance and uptime are directly correlated to enterprise productivity and collaboration, and therefore significantly impact the business bottom line.
Network issues often force Network Managers play their own versions of the Game of Thrones, trying to balance the often conflicting requirements of IT/Application Managers, complaining end users, and the IT budgeting team. Amidst macro IT trends like cloud adoption and mobility, this balancing act can get tricky!
Traditional architectures are like the wall in Game of Thrones. It worked in the past, but you know that this new normal demands something better.
And, “When you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.”
Most global businesses use MPLS for their primary application traffic and use Internet links as both backup to their MPLS network and as primary links to smaller branch offices. The adoption of enterprise and CRM applications on the cloud has added another level of complexity, since these functions have moved from behind the firewall to outside of it, and these too are accessed over the public Internet.
Contrary to popular belief, globalization and MPLS do not work well together – for business reasons. While pricing for MPLS has dropped a good deal within the US and Europe in the last few years, connecting to China, India, Brazil or Australia can still be prohibitively expensive. Plus, lengthy deployment times (which can take 6 months or more) can lead to a longer time to market and undue project implementation delays.
Try telling your MPLS vendor that you’re moving your office just across the street in Shanghai, and you’ll know what we’re talking about!
Secondly, with cloud adoption reaching ubiquity, and tons of SaaS vendors offering enterprise applications, CRM, and BI solutions with a web front end, Network Managers are facing a whole new set of challenges.
It’s not the wildlings you need to worry about, but the White Walkers.
Since the access medium to all these cloud services is primarily the Internet, application performance takes an obvious hit. And MPLS cannot help!
However, all hope is not lost!
Aryaka’s hassle-free, next-generation network is the perfect solution to combat the woes of a “Networking winter.” We offer our customers the world’s only global, private, and optimized WAN that delivers the simplicity and agility necessary to address all enterprise connectivity and application-performance needs. Aryaka optimizes both site-to-site and site-to-cloud traffic over a private backbone that completely bypasses the unreliable public Internet. We eliminate the need for deploying piecemeal solutions like costly WAN appliances, long-haul private MPLS links, and traditional CDNs. Our deployment times are typically in minutes, compared to the weeks or months it takes MPLS to deploy.
Like Dragon Glass and Valyrian Steel (the only known weapons against the White Walkers), we arm you with the industry’s best solutions to combat latency, subpar network performance, and end user complaints – Aryaka’s SD-WAN as-a-Service and CDN as-a-Service.
And guess what, you don’t need to take our word for it. We understand it’s not an easy decision, so we offer free trials – and our trials replicate your production environment. What you see is what you get, rather than some test version that skews results.
Winter is coming for Network Managers in the form of globalization, the cloud, and mobility. If you’re prepared, you have nothing to worry about. In fact, you can turn winter to your advantage. If you’re not ready, well, think again!
Here’s how you can brace yourselves for the networking winter!
– Jeff Vance
