Crunching the Numbers on SD-WAN Reliability and Speed: Internet vs. Global Private Networks

How long is 4,000 milliseconds? It depends on who you ask.

For global enterprises whose success depends on getting information to the other side of the planet and back quickly and reliably, 4000 milliseconds can be an eternity.

Unfortunately, it’s also how long it can take a 100kb file to get from London to Dubai–if your enterprise relies on the Internet for connectivity.

And that is too slow for global enterprises seeking to compete in 2017 and beyond.

The Internet can be acceptable for users accessing Cloud/SaaS applications within the same region, but user experience deteriorates significantly with an increase in distance. Latency, packet loss, and jitter are inherent to the Internet, and these issues are aggravated with every extra mile traveled. They will cost your business time, money, and the trust of your users, as well as the productivity of your remote and mobile workforce.

How do we know? Because we crunched the numbers. To demonstrate the difference in performance that you might expect from using a private network versus the Internet, we ran a series of global application performance tests. Results were measured and compared between the same pairs of locations, both over Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN and on the Internet.

Here’s how we ran the test. We sent randomly generated 100KB file from one location to another, and the following statistics were returned:

• HTTP result code
• Connect time (milliseconds)
• Transfer time (milliseconds)
• The values used for the purpose of the analysis were a summation of the transfer and connect times, when the HTTP result code was non zero.
• Application Response Time = Connect time + Transfer Time

The blue line in the performance comparison graph represents the Internet, and the green line represents Aryaka.

For global organizations depending on real time response, the differences are staggering. Overall, SD-WANs using a global private network were 4.1x faster than solutions exclusively using the Internet:

For more information, check out our full report, which presents a quantitative analysis of SD-WAN deployments that are built on the Internet vs. global private networks (such as Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN ). We compared and contrasted application response times between various global locations and examined key factors that impact the performance of cloud and SaaS applications.

This data provides IT leaders with key insights and considerations for evaluating the best underlying transport deployment for their SD-WAN solutions, so they can count on enterprise-grade connectivity with reliable and consistent performance for all applications, including on-premises, SaaS, and cloud services for voice, video, and data.

Contact us to learn more about how next-generation private networks, like Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN, combine the security and reliability of a private network with the flexibility, low cost, and quick deployment of the Internet to deliver a superior connectivity solution.

About the author

Jason Wells

Jason Wells is Vice President EMEA & APAC at Aryaka, and leads business development operations for both regions. He has over 15 years’ experience developing growth and adoption for some of the leading security, network, and communications solutions within the industry today.