The State of SD-WAN Connectivity: Performance By the Numbers

Network Over SD-WAN

What would you do with an extra 4,000 milliseconds in your day? Probably not much because the time would be over before you even knew it began. But what about an extra 4,000 milliseconds (4 seconds) every time you did something in Salesforce or Zoom or Office 365?

These applications, used by distributed teams around the world are commonly hosted entirely online instead of on private networks. This leads to packet loss and other problems that are common with Internet-based applications. The lag time increases the farther the information has to travel, which is problematic for companies with multiple offices around the world.

Rather than speaking in vague terms about these issues, Aryaka decided to do some testing to quantify exactly what the performance impacts are when it comes to doing common business-related tasks.

What We Did

We sent a 100kb file from one location in the world to another over Aryaka’s global SD-WAN and the Internet and measured the following:

  • HTTP result code
  • Connection time (milliseconds)
  • Transfer time (milliseconds)

We added the connection time and the transfer time to derive the application response time when the HTTP result code was not zero.

Application Performance Comparison for Sending Data from London to Shanghai

We didn’t just do this for one day or one week — these tests were performed over the course of an entire year, and the data we collected averaged the final results. This is part of ongoing testing that we do to ensure our products and services are meeting the standards we provide our customers.

The results of our tests are captured in a report on how SD-WAN compares to the Internet when it comes to hosting cloud and SaaS applications and sharing information around the world.

The Findings

What did we find as a result of all this testing? Overall, Aryaka’s global private network was four times faster at delivering the files than solutions that rely solely on the Internet. We also saw that the farther the information has to travel, the more the lag time increases.

Comparing Application Response Time – Internet vs. Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN

For example, our testing found that it takes a 100KB file 200 milliseconds to travel from San Jose to Chicago over an Internet-based SD-WAN. It took the same file 4,000 milliseconds to travel from San Jose to Shanghai.

When the files were transferred using Aryaka’s global SD-WAN, the transfer time to Chicago was 150 milliseconds) and the transfer time to Shanghai was 300 milliseconds.

In another example, files sent between Dallas and Dubai over an Internet-based SD-WAN took between 750 milliseconds and two seconds to arrive. Files going from Dubai to Mumbai varied even more, from 127 milliseconds to four seconds.

This indicates a long response time that is prone to fluctuating wildly. Files sent over the Aryaka network were much more consistent, with only a 12-15 percent variation in response time.

These milliseconds-long differences might not sound like a big deal, but think about how often files are sent around the world through Internet-based applications. A few seconds of lag time on each transfer adds up to minutes each day and compounds to hours the longer the delays persist.

Any time that a user is waiting for something to transfer is lost productivity and, in turn, lost revenue for the company. Lag times and inconsistency also impact user experience and can lead to decreased confidence that the applications are doing what they are supposed to do.

Next Steps

The data we collected makes a pretty strong case for why your organization should consider a global private network. We will continue to monitor performance speeds of our network vs. Internet-based options and provide additional reports as needed.

You’ve already invested the money to build a global team and infrastructure for your business, why sacrifice that with slow performance times for the applications you use to run it?

Aryaka is one option for a global SD-WAN, and we would love to talk with you about next steps for bringing it to your organization. No matter what provider you choose, your organization needs a global private network.

Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN Architecture
Aryaka Global SD-WAN

When evaluating options, look for one that will meet your organization’s needs right now, and one that is flexible enough to meet them in the future. Your employees might not miss the extra milliseconds in your day right now, but they will notice an improvement on a more reliable network.

A global SD-WAN will allow your organization’s team members across the world to interact as seamlessly as employees who work in the same office building — the true epitome of global connectivity.

Download the State of SD-WAN Connectivity Report to learn more.

About the author

Gary Sevounts
Gary Sevounts is the Chief Marketing Officer at Aryaka Networks, and is responsible for Aryaka’s global marketing efforts. He has extensive experience with software and SaaS products in the IT infrastructure and security space, as well as marketing and sales technology, having held marketing and product management leadership roles with a number of industry leaders.