How the WAN Is Changing in the Age of As-A-Service: A Webinar Recap

“We’re witnessing the fastest transformation of the WAN ever seen,” said Dave Nuti, VP of Americas for Aryaka.

Dave and John Burke, Principal Research Analyst & CIO at Nemertes Research, co-hosted a highly informative webinar on the need for IT executives to consider new alternatives to network deployment in order to keep up with today’s business demands.

Over 80 CIOs and technology leaders from enterprises around the world participated.

For those of you unable to attend, the full recording is available here, or continue below and take a look at the highlights:

The SaaS Revolution Impacts the Network
With the growth of the cloud, traditional WAN technologies are struggling to remain competitive.

Legacy WANs (such as MPLS), were built to help employees access applications in the corporate data center. However, customer requirements have dramatically changed as mission-critical applications have moved to the cloud (such as Salesforce and Office 365).

Burke noted this presents problems since MPLS sends all internet-bound traffic through the data center. This inefficiency slows application performance.

Will SD-WANs Come to the Rescue?
SD-WANs are an appealing alternative since they eliminate many of the MPLS challenges. They also provide branch offices with direct internet access, so cloud applications can be accessed faster. This also lowers bandwidth costs and many enterprises have already realized huge savings by using internet connections with SD-WANs.

Momentum is building for SD-WAN. According to Nemertes research, 18% of enterprises are currently using SD-WANs, while over 45% are either planning to use or evaluate the technology.

Customer success stories are also fueling interest. In a survey of SD-WAN early adopters, 95% have experienced reductions in WAN troubleshooting tickets and 92% have experienced a reduction in network outages.

The Public Internet: A Potential Rain Cloud
Unfortunately, conventional SD-WANs use the congested public internet for connectivity, which is prone to delivering frustratingly poor performance due to high packet loss and fluctuating latencies.

The public internet provides a reliable and flexible user connection, particularly on the first and last mile of the network. However, the middle mile, which covers long-distance international links, is where most network problems reside. The problem stems from a lack of control over the long distance networks, where a “free-for-all” ensues with every kind of application competing for the same limited bandwidth.

In-Net SD-WAN: Private Connectivity with the Same Flexibility
Instead of your business relying on the congested public internet for the middle mile, organizations can rely on a global private network.

An in-net SD-WAN with a private network empowers users from the middle, thus delivering faster application delivery and performance with minimal packet loss. Not to mention at much greater availability and lower cost.

Aryaka: The Global SD-WAN
Aryaka’s SmartConnect is a global in-net SD-WAN solution built over a global private network that bypasses the public internet on the congested middle-mile.

“Aryaka provides a stable core network connection that mitigates loss with a Layer 2 connection, and includes embedded in-net optimization and application acceleration,” stated Nuti, “As a result, Aryaka enhances application performance by eliminating latency and packet loss and provides up to 40x improved performance for on-premises, cloud, and SaaS applications.”

Aryaka’s global private network consists of 26 Points of Presence (PoPs) on all six habitable continents. These PoPs are strategically located so that 95% of the world’s business users are within 30 milliseconds of an Aryaka PoP.

The Proof: Customer Success
Some of today’s largest enterprises have already deployed Aryaka’s SmartConnect to resolve issues around Cloud and SaaS connectivity worldwide.

Audio manufacturer, Skullcandy, was experiencing poor performance with their cloud-based ERP system (SAP Business ByDesign) and telepresence solution through their MPLS connections. Performance challenges were especially great at their China office.

Skullcandy replaced their MPLS network with Aryaka SmartConnect. Deployment was complete in a matter of hours and they achieved over 10x faster application performance, a seamless telepresence experience in all global locations, and improved file transfer rates. Skullcandy also realized 40% cost savings compared to their previous MPLS links.

Transformative Events Require Transformative Solutions
The SaaS revolution is causing unprecedented changes with WANs and how they’re architected. Conventional SD-WANs solve many of the problems associated with legacy MPLS networks, but their Achilles heel is relying on the congested public internet.

To build a substantial business case for a global SD-WAN, here are the main things Nemertes suggests to consider:

• Agility—Speed of deployment has value!
• Cost—The ability to remove CapEx cost from legacy networks such as MPLS pays off in the long run
• Performance—Speeding up application performance is big for any global enterprise
• Control—The opportunity to control connectivity over long distance networks is something you cannot find through the public internet or managing multiple MPLS contracts

However, it’s also important to keep this in mind. If you’re looking to deploy SD-WAN for your global enterprise, be sure it has a solution that solves the problems at the middle mile. That is the only way to ensure application performance remains consistent for branch offices worldwide.

We invite you to try a free proof-of-concept with Aryaka and see how SmartConnect can speed up cloud and SaaS connectivity for your branch offices worldwide.