User-to-Cloud Workloads and SASE: Why the Internet Isn’t Good Enough

New Gartner Emerging Tech Report Includes Aryaka

Recently, Gartner published a very informative document detailing the need for effective multi-cloud connectivity for SASE performance, available for download here. The title is a mouthful – ‘Leverage Cloud Connect Infrastructure to Improve Connectivity Experience of Cloud Workloads for SASE Solutions – A Gartner® Emerging Tech Report’ – but it is the contents that count. The report highlights two key findings –

• User-to-cloud workload is the primary workload for secure access service edge (SASE) solutions to improve connectivity experience. However, the internet as the default WAN is not reliable, and end users’ self-adopting cloud connect infrastructure makes management complex.
• The poorly performing WAN interconnecting various types of SASE points of presence (POPs) greatly slows overall SASE solution performance because user traffic must go through one or multiple POPs as inspection points to fulfill network and security policies.

This report helps to dispel any confusion that premium connectivity is not a required part of SASE, a view that a few of the security vendors have taken where they have no SD-WAN on offer. Their response?  Just throw it over the internet! Although this may be a viable option for some enterprises, in some regions, and with select applications, it is a recipe for sub-par application performance and employee productivity.

At Aryaka, we firmly believe that a managed middle-mile, with regional IaaS/PaaS/SaaS handoffs, is the proper architecture. And we offer choice, either our ‘better-than-MPLS’ leased fiber wavelength core and the gold standard for global application performance, or, for those applications that are more resilient, an Enhanced Internet offer but without the inefficiencies introduced by peering between ISPs. This latter offer is ideal for the mid-market (SME), and we’ve just announced new entry pricing to make the decision to go with Aryaka even easier.

Critical Insights and Impacts on Product Leaders

The following graphic on the left is from Gartner’s recent report showing the critical insights (dark blue) and the impacts on product leaders (light blue). On the right we summarized the insights and how Aryaka’s solution help enterprises to improve user-to-cloud workloads performance in a multi-cloud environment as a managed service and avoids pitfalls of a disjointed SASE architecture with our single-pass architecture and unified management.

Global Footprint of HyperScale PoPs and Multi-Cloud On-Ramps

With our Hyperscale PoP architecture, we’ve established direct connections across the globe into the major public clouds – AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud. For example, if you have a facility in South America, and need access to AWS, we have a local cross-connect in San Paolo vs having to backhaul traffic to Miami or Dallas. The same applies for every cloud provider and in every region. And if a site is located next to one of our PoPs that doesn’t offer this direct connect, our middle-mile ensures a flawless application experience between the site and the nearest cloud handoff.

Aryaka one of Five Vendors Named in Gartner Report

For completeness, we are one of five vendors mentioned by name, but the only one that both develops the technology and offers it as a tiered global service. What we’ve been saying for years – take a look back to our webinar 18 months ago – the world is now embracing! And if you’ve not done so already, please download the report and read for yourself.