Aryaka’s SD-WAN and SASE solutions – What’s new and why should you care?

Today Aryaka announced several new innovations that set the stage for the next year and more.

These address the growth mandates that CEOs are aiming for, while dealing with unprecedented change, the pace of which has been accelerated by the pandemic over the past two years. Businesses the world over have to contend with previously unimaginable situations like rapid consolidation of their office footprint, closure or relocation of their work environments, rapid shifts in their workforce to be fully or partially remote and all the while ensuring that their productivity, security and collaboration needs are taken care of. All this uncontrolled change creates a tremendous amount of flux in an organization, aside controlled change like M&A or geographical expansion. How then to address growth, when dealing with change all the time?

CEOs are leaning on their CIOs and technology platforms within organizations to manage change. This has led to adoption of Cloud-First architectures and the preference is for such platforms that lend themselves to agility and complex change management.

The wide area network (WAN) connectivity for offices and users, as well as their security have all become highly important in this context, serving as the lifeblood for organizational connectivity, employee productivity and application experience. Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) are two architectural categories that have formed over the years to address these, the latter being more recent and more nascent across the industry.

Acronyms aside, the primary objective is to deliver the best possible network connectivity, security posture and application experience regardless of the location of the user, site, or application, anywhere, with the ability to change the services dynamically based on the needs of the business.

This leads to the four dimensions of the announcement today that cut across the architecture, new products and services, consumption model as well as Aryaka’s support and lifecycle services.

4 Dimensions of the Announcement

Innovations to Break Through the Status Quo

Let’s consider some of the Architectural innovations first.

Introducing Aryaka FlexCore and AppAssure
Aryaka has always been known for its global high-performance network, with its unique POP-architecture and global L2 private core that primarily served as a replacement for traditional MPLS, combining the benefits of the predictability of MPLS with the agility of a cloud- first solution

A “Cloud-First” Architecture Built for Flexibility

The company is bringing in a new L3 private core targeteing Enhanced Internet connectivity, but with the management consistency that Aryaka brings to the mix. Now the L2 private core, highly optimized for performance sensitivy applications is supplemented by the L3 private core that is more optiized for cost and can be an effective substitute for traditional SD-WAN/Internet type of connectivity.

The ability to take advantage of both through the same architecture and being able to switch between one or another gives enterprises a significant degree of flexibility to mange change.

This is also complemeted by AppAssure that provides deep classificaiton, deterministic control and visibility to 3500+ applications “out of the box”.

Next, some of the products and Aryaka services

New SASE offering – Aryaka Prime EZ

With the acquisition of Secucloud in May 2021, we indicated that we’d announce new SASE offerings towards the end of the year. This is debuting under the Aryaka Prime family for SASE and ready for Beta engagements with customers.

The initial offering called Aryaka Prime EZ, leverages the L3 private core along with new Secure Web Gateway (SWG) capabilities with Firewall-as-a-service, web filtering, threat protection etc., consumption friendly pricing and packaging model. We expect an early uptake with small to medium sized enterprises to begin with and to evolve into more complex requirements over a period of time.

There is an intent to have a more advanced SASE offering with the L2 Private core and advanced security capabilities – called Prime Pro – that would be made available as our security capaibitlties evolve and be announced at a future date.

The existing productized solutions with technology partners like Check Point software and Palo Alto networks would continue to be sold and supported based on customer preferences for those firewalls and supported deployment criterial

New SD-WAN and SASE Products

Expanded SD-WAN offerings – Aryaka SmartConnect Pro and SmartConnect EZ

One of the innovations we brought was to radically simplify the consumption model with “T-shirt sized pricing” into the flagship Smartconnect offering. These would start with five t-shirt sizes of S, M, L, XL, XXL to simplify the quoting, deployment, consumption, change management and tracking.

We’re calling this SmartConnect Pro. This offering leverages the existing L2 private core and marries that with the T-shirt sized consumption and packaging.

A brand new managed SD-WAN offering called SmartConnect EZ is also being introduced leveraging the new L3 private core and debuting at an attractive cost point that would make it easy to consider it as a replacement for traditional overlay SD-WAN/Enhanced Internet category and can be combined with last-mile services to have a very compelling deployment.

We expect this to be more attractive to segments and deployments that are more cost-sensitive, and where the high degree of application performance and latency sensitivity is not an issue. It opens up new use-cases for Aryaka customers to bring non-premier sites into the Aryaka managed SD-WAN fold. It also opens up new opportunities for Aryaka channel partners, and we expect this to have strong resonance with a partner-led motion.

By taking advantage of the same underlying POP-based architeture, these new products offer tremendous flexibility to customers to engage with one offering, say SmartConnect EZ and change to other services (like SmartConnect Pro) or a new architecture like Prime EZ with minimal to no disruption and in a graceful manner.

Eventually Aryaka’s SASE is designed to reflect a tightly integrated approach that delivers the best experience with a high-performing network, pervasive security and a service delivery that would be managed or co-managed based on the preference of the customer and/or channel partner

Aryaka Managed SASE

LAN-Like Application Experience | Highly Secure | Easy to Consume

New Lifecycle Service Tiers – Gold & Silver

Aryaka has always been known for its excellence in its managed services and support offering, which is known to go “above and beyond”. In some ways this has been the Gold standard for the industry and has resulted in high ratings.

As we introduce the “EZ line”, we are conscious that that is for more cost-conscious deployments and are therefore introducing a Silver tier of support and services that are aligned with such deployments. Customers with EZ can always upgrade their support services to Gold, thus providing additional flexibility. The “Pro” line would have the Gold tier by default.

Bringing it all together – The power of purposeful design and integration

Eventually customers like Aryaka as the architecture brings together the network and security technology that traditional technology vendors do, with a global network that traditional Telco/s carriers build along with a managed services model that we see from MSPs/SIs and carriers. It is the combination of these three “silos”, brought together in a purposeful manner that allows Aryaka to deliver on the promise of agility and change management.

The power of integration, the flexibility of the architecture and the passion of the people have resulted in a highly tuned offering that scores very highly with customers as evidenced in the likes of the Gartner Voice of the customer 2021.

With these new offerings, as a customer you can be more assured about your choice of architecture with its flexibility, agility and cost of ownership benefits.

As a partner, you can be more excited about the opportunity multiplication and differentiation it brings to your customer to transform their WAN and security.

Please reach out to Aryaka with questions and be sure to watch our “Breakthrough Event” announcing all of these with demos, customers, partners and some seriously fun hosting.

About the author

Shashi Kiran

Shashi Kiran is the Chief Marketing Officer at Aryaka Networks responsible for Aryaka’s global marketing, product management and technology partnerships. He brings over 20 years of experience in the hi-tech industry across marketing, product management, business development and partnerships.