Without reliable networks, the IoT ain’t gonna work

It used to be considered cool if you owned one of those cell phones the size of a VHS cartridge. The savvy and successful loved to brandish their new flip phones, snapping it open and closed with a flourish. In a very short timeframe, we have moved from owning cumbersome personal computers and landline phones, to veritable “Swiss Army” arsenals of high-tech gadgets.

From connected cars, wearables, smart homes, smart phones, TVs, laptops and millions of devices with sensors, everything today that has an electronic pulse can be network-connected. The ubiquitous Internet of Things (IoT) sees no end in sight, and the market sizing estimates over the next few years are over a trillion dollars.

The network impact from the IoT
We read about the many capabilities and untold benefits of the IoT, but, we rarely hear about the huge impact all the devices, applications and data have on the data centers, clouds and networks that deliver them. While both consumers and enterprises get new and very cool applications, the result is networks become congested and bandwidth gets quickly consumed, making the delivery system for IoT slow and unreliable.

The Internet of Things is at a seminal point, where all the devices, appliances, sensors, M2M, and valuable data are at risk of losing their value and effectiveness. The IoT runs across unreliable networks that move data from every connected thing, to the data centers and hubs where we manage and analyze unimaginable amounts of data. Data has become the gold in the prospectors pan. Every organization and industry, from utilities to telecommunications, entertainment to ecommerce, and government agencies to manufacturers, want to learn more about their users, and to improve planning, operations and maintenance. The best way for them to do this is to have lots of data to analyze and make decisions, and all this relies on an unfailing, consistent, flexible and fast data delivery infrastructure.

The IoT needs a better DoT
To make sure the IoT works, there is an obvious need to do something about long distant networks. Can you imagine if our transportation highways and city streets had to contend with more traffic besides our cars, buses and motorcycles? I wonder how the Department of Transportation would deal with tens of millions of additional vehicles traveling alongside ours. What about having high-priority lanes for some special kinds of vehicles? There might be new rules for who, or what, gets the right of way. Our highways and city streets are congested today, so the whole idea of adding tens of millions of new vehicles would be impossible for today’s traffic systems. We would have to build an entirely new transportation infrastructure.

A similar problem exists for our networks that transport the IoT. The Internet of the recent past and present simply isn’t capable or reliable enough to keep pace with the ever-increasing volumes of data. Just as the IoT is causing a transformational change in the way organizations plan and execute based on the data they analyze; in order to fully realize the benefits, we need to have a transformational change in our network infrastructure.

Fortunately, there are a lot of smart people working on the evolution of our networks, in the form of software-defined WAN. Virtualization, software and orchestration are the keys to the future of networking infrastructure.

Aryaka’s purpose-built global SD-WAN
Our Software-Defined WAN is built on top of our Global Private Network to deliver enhanced application performance, reduced costs and simplified network operations at branch offices. Aryaka’s Global Private Network bypasses the frailty of the public Internet, and delivers predictable application performance to enterprise users around the world by overcoming congestion, latency and packet loss.

With our built-in WAN optimization, Aryaka provides up to 40x faster performance for global on-premises and cloud/SaaS applications. With HTTP/HTTPS optimization, enterprises gain consistently faster performance for dynamic web, SaaS and IP-based, IoT-enabled applications around the world.

Our global SD-WAN more closely binds the relationship between data center infrastructure such as computing, storage and applications, with our global network that delivers all kinds of applications.

Aryaka encompasses all elements within the network infrastructure, adds a software layer on top that enables the operations for deploying, provisioning and configuring the entire infrastructure, and everything is executed through our orchestration.

There is no doubt that with the IoT growing exponentially every year, the vast amounts of traffic being generated are having a huge impact on networks that simply can’t keep up. The challenges to support IoT will also grow exponentially, until we finally evolve our network infrastructure to support the future of our network connected world.

With Aryaka, that future has arrived today!

About the author

Gary Sevounts

Gary Sevounts is the Chief Marketing Officer at Aryaka Networks, and is responsible for Aryaka’s global marketing efforts. He has extensive experience with software and SaaS products in the IT infrastructure and security space, as well as marketing and sales technology, having held marketing and product management leadership roles with a number of industry leaders.