Are SaaS Cloud Applications Slowing You Down?

When it comes to productivity in today’s global business environment, every second counts.

If your employees can check Twitter, order lunch, and buy something from Amazon in the time it takes to run a report, then slow cloud or SaaS application is hurting your business.

A recent study on mobile and data management found that two seconds is the threshold for a website acceptability. 53% of visits are abandoned if a site takes longer than three seconds to load.

Slow performance is a huge problem with SaaS applications — and will continue to be as long as companies are relying on the public Internet for connecting to cloud and SaaS providers. But if you can improve network performance, you can also improve application performance.

According to Gartner, organizations are continuing to increase the utilization and investment in many cloud and SaaS services, including unified communications (UCaaS) and video conferencing, as well as the Internet of Things (IoT). This will fuel the growth of U.S. WAN traffic by 25% to 30% per year through 2020.

The growing demand for connectivity to and among cloud services forces enterprises to speed up their network upgrade projects to establish secure, reliable, and high-quality connections from branch offices to cloud providers.

The Most Precious Cargo of All

JAS Worldwide is a cargo company that provides logistic services and supply chain activities such as inventory management, warehousing services.

With nearly 4,000 employees in 240 offices, they handle air, ocean, customs brokerage, warehousing, import and export, and supply chain management. Perhaps the most vital items that they move is the data and information they use to keep their business running.

JAS needed to standardize multiple systems that were housed across the world. CIO Mark Baker implemented a SaaS-based ERP application called CargoWiseOne to standardized multiple systems that were housed around the world, but the public Internet provided unreliable performance and the application suffered as a result.

Depending on where JAS employees were located, they would be getting a much different user experience from using CargoWiseOne, and this had a ripple effect on their customer’s experience.

JAS needed to find a way to fix this problem for all their global employees to sustain their global productivity.

The solution

JAS leveraged Aryaka’s Managed SD-WAN to solve application performance challenges by establishing secure, reliable, and high-quality connections from branch offices to the CargoWiseOne cloud.

Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN combines cloud-based WAN optimization technology with enterprise-grade connectivity, which provided JAS with a way to directly connect to any cloud service and leverage world-class optimization benefits.

Aryaka operates a cloud-native, private WAN with 28 points of presence (POPs) around the world that are within 30 milliseconds of 95% of global business users and SaaS providers, including Cargo WiseOne. The POPs are connected by a meshed Layer 2 network that is fully managed and optimized using patented technology.

“Aryaka allowed JAS employees around the world to access CargoWiseOne through a secure, private, fast connection. Not only we feel productivity increased, I was delighted with how quickly we could exchange data. In addition, we saved 56% in cost savings,” said JAS CIO Mark Baker.

Aryaka also manages JAS’s global network on a 24×7 basis. No matter where disruptions occur, the source of the problem can be identified and resolved quickly. This frees up JAS’s IT team to focus on other projects and goals to move the organization forward.

A dilemma for global organizations

JAS is not alone and many global companies encounter similar challenges when it comes to cloud/SaaS application performance:

• How do you provide high application performance with alongside agility during rapid growth?
• How do you provide a worldwide staff with a consistent, productive end-user experience?
• How do you do all this while keeping the cost down?

Legacy solutions like MPLS combined with WAN optimization hardware, are both expensive and not built for quick deployment. And, they still don’t solve the problem of slow cloud/SaaS application performance.

Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN accelerates access to all public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments with a combination of our enterprise-grade private network and our globally distributed optimization platform.

This is not something that a traditional MPLS network could accomplish. With an agile, cloud-delivered solution in place, any organization can see a boost in cloud and SaaS application performance.

To learn more, download our white paper, MPLS Alternatives: The Definitive Guide.