Is There a Tear in Your Network Fabric?

If the enterprise WAN is like a fabric, stitched together with hardware, software, and the human resources who maintain it, it’s possible that the advent of the cloud has created a large hole. Is there a tear in your network fabric?

Missing Threads

For years, the enterprise WAN was composed of interconnecting links and pipes, most usually through MPLS.

With MPLS, an application or data housed in the company’s headquarters or data center could travel to a branch office with little to no problem, barring long delays for deployment and scaling and potential latency over long distances.

Though creating a global network quilt was a little DIY, requiring IT to stitch together contracts from multiple vendors around the world, the coverage worked for enterprises’ needs at the time.

But in today’s cloud-first business environment, where work is increasingly mobile and globalized, an MPLS-based WAN is missing major threads.

MPLS is point-to-point, which means that it cannot reach the cloud without workarounds and extra hardware and/or software. And connecting to the cloud via the public Internet introduces latency, packet loss, and jitter, as well as security issues – all situations that MPLS was supposed to correct for. That means the performance of mission- and business-critical applications suffer on an MPLS-based enterprise WAN.

For the same reasons, MPLS is not optimized for the remote and mobile workforce. When workers leave branch offices to complete tasks – such as salespeople working on the go or developers working from home – MPLS networks can’t reach them. That means IT must make an investment in VPN or other secure mobile networks. In addition, branch offices in developing or remote areas may not even be accessible by MPLS, requiring similar add-ons.

Frayed Edges

For many network providers today, the solution to the “missing threads” is to pile on hardware and software at the edge. Unfortunately, this creates frayed edges in the network fabric. SD-WAN is useful for connecting to the cloud; however, when placed at the edge, it only solves for problems at the edge.

And if the entire fabric is missing a thread, adding a small bit at the edge doesn’t make up for the instability throughout the rest of the network.

SD-WAN that relies on the public Internet to connect users to mission- and business-critical applications is SD-WAN without an optimized middle mile. The public Internet is subject to disruption, and because it’s a public WAN, it is unpredictable in its disruptions. In addition, for global businesses, latency gets worse as distances between users and data increase. So even if SD-WAN improves connectivity at the edge, business users are still subject to slow connections and poor application performance.

What enterprises need to make sure you have in the right application delivery is a fabric that comes with it’s own thread.

Blanketing the Globe with Better Application Performance

Aryaka’s Managed SD-WAN is just such a thread. Rather than optimizing an old technology that can’t keep up with changing business needs or relying on the public Internet for connectivity, Aryaka’s SmartCONNECT is the network fabric.

Using a purpose-built, enterprise-grade global private network, Aryaka has abstracted connectivity to 28 POPs around the world, all within 30 ms of 95% of the world’s business users. Those POPs connect to Aryaka’s network access points, giving your enterprise users an easy way to hop onto the network from anywhere they do business.

It also contains built-in SD-WAN to reduce complexity and cost, along with WAN Optimization layered on top of the network to increase application performance for end users around the globe.

This secure network is therefore not subject to disruption like the public Internet, nor is it expensive, difficult, and time-consuming to deploy. Instead, it provides accelerated access to every SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS platform with the privacy and stability you would expect from an enterprise network. Aryaka provides simple and quick deployment with on-demand scalability for faster project implementation – all you need is a few days (or even hours), and the network can be set up or scaled anywhere in the world.

Don’t let the cloud unravel your enterprise network. Give the only network that can truly blanket the globe a try today. Contact us for a proof of concept.

About the author

Shilpa Swamy

Shilpa Swamy is Product Marketing Manager at Aryaka Networks. She has a background in Product Management and has held various engineering roles in the telecom and networking industry.