Announcing a Business Productivity Solution for the Global Telecommuter Enabled by Aryaka’s Secure Remote Access

In the current environment, many companies are mandating people to work from home in the Asia Pacific Region. In this digital age, working from home is a normal phenomenon. Thanks to Virtual Private Network (VPN) solutions, you can securely connect from your laptop to the corporate network and have access to the business applications to perform your work. The expectation from the remote workers being fully productive using VPN is no different than any employee working from the office.

Most of the companies offer some type of remote VPN solution but they were never designed to scale for the present situation when all the employees in the region are working remotely. As a result, VPN servers are getting overloaded with the number of connections and amount of throughput required to support such a large workforce. To mitigate the scale issue, enterprises are having remote users in the APAC region connect to VPN servers in EMEA or North America.

Even though these remote users can connect to globally dispersed VPN servers to access business applications, the user-experience is poor because the transport is across the long-haul public internet. The internet, especially across long distances, suffers from high levels of packet loss as well as increased latency and jitter. The users will experience quality issues with business applications and productivity will suffer. IT teams also lack visibility into the network since traffic is traversing over the public internet. Without that visibility, application performance challenges become difficult to monitor or predict, and hard for the network administrators to troubleshoot as they end up working with multiple providers to resolve the connectivity and performance issues.

Aryaka’s Secure Remote Access (SRA), part of Aryaka SmartSecure, offers a unique solution which can significantly improve any existing remote VPN solution deployed by the customer. It provides Aryaka’s global private backbone network for remote users to connect to any corporate VPN server in the world. This makes the existing VPN solution easily scalable for the customers. With Aryaka SRA deployed, IT can easily manage the entire workforce of a specific region using remote VPNs.

As you can see from the diagram below, remote VPN users from the APAC region can connect to the VPN servers in other regions in two ways:

1. Over the public internet. Here, the traffic will be going through multiple providers in different countries until it finally reaches to the VPN Server. This is the un-reliable path with connectivity and latency issues impacting the access to the business applications.
2. Over the Aryaka Private Core Network. With the Aryaka SRA solution deployed, the traffic from the remote VPN user will be rerouted via the nearest Aryaka PoP from the client. It will go through the private core with guaranteed SLAs and will exit from the PoP nearest to the VPN server. In addition, IT will now have additional visibility when traffic is routed via this path via the Aryaka customer portal (MyAryaka).

When using the Aryaka SRA solution, the client experience will be very similar as if the VPN server is in the same region as the end user. This will provide the scale to meet the demand for having remote VPN access to all the employees working from home.

What is required to turn on the Aryaka Remote Access solution?

The solution is very simple, and Aryaka can turn it on for you in minutes. It doesn’t require you to deploy any hardware or software.

Here are the steps to enable the service:

1. The customer provides the domain name or IP addresses of all VPN concentrators that have to be accelerated over Aryaka’s network.
2. For each VPN concentrator, Aryaka’s provisioning team will provide customers with a Canonical Name record (CNAME).
3. The following changes are required on the customer VPN:
   1. Change the DNS record for the VPN domain to use the Aryaka provided CNAME.
   2. Alternately, if you only want to accelerate a select set of remote users connecting to a VPN concentrator, you can change the VPN client settings to use the Aryaka provided CNAME.

Once the solution is implemented, customers will have access to the MyAryaka Cloud Portal which will give them complete visibility to their VPN connections and observed latency going through the Aryaka private core.

Here is a sample graph from the customer portal on Connection Setup Time.

In the above example, the connections to the VPN concentrators are accelerated via the private backbone. In some instances, you can notice that the normal latency due to distance between the client and server could be as high as 500 msec, but Aryaka is reducing the connection time by half and the remote user will see the benefit of switching from the internet to Aryaka right away. There are additional stats available on the portal which can help IT go deeper into any connection if they need to troubleshoot connectivity issue.

With Aryaka SRA deployed in minutes, remote workers will have a significantly improved user experience resulting in productivity and IT meeting the business continuity plan.

The Offer

For a limited time, Aryaka is offering a special offer that includes a free VPN concentrator domain license with new qualifying purchases of the Aryaka SmartSecure Remote Access solution (promotion valid until Apr 30 for both new and existing customers). This will allow enterprises to quickly and efficiently support the needs of their remote workers – and have then up and running in a matter of minutes or hours!

Contact us for more details on this promotional offering.