By Brett Steingo, Managing Director of Aryaka Africa
If you are responsible for your organisation’s IT and don’t already manage a global network, you probably will within the next 6 months!
I’m not predicting the sudden international expansion of every company behind every reader of this article. I am referring to an inevitability brought about by the proliferation of cloud computing.
Global MPLS went onto life-support some time ago:
International companies have, for years, addressed latency issues between geographically dispersed sites by throwing money at WAN Optimisation devices and ever-increasing bandwidth. Over the last decade or so however, the traditional problems that gave rise to these solutions began to dissipate. The last mile is no longer the bottle-neck, internet access is no longer prohibitively expensive or unreliable and initial security concerns have been somewhat alleviated.
Internet VPNs have been in-and-out of fashion. In – because they offer flexibility and take advantage of plummeting internet bandwidth prices. Out – because VPN tunnels becoming increasingly complex to manage the more you add and because, while the internet is substantially better than before, it still does not meet the performance criteria of today’s global applications.
So network owners vacillate between the two.
More recently, those in the know discovered hybrid networks. Built on a foundation of Software-Defined Networking (SDN), these networks take the best from both worlds. They use the internet for the ‘last mile’ and a dedicated core network for long distance data transfer: flexibility and affordability where performance matters least, reliability and quality where you need it most.
Most importantly, the best of these networks (like Aryaka…. OK, only Aryaka) come with embedded TCP Optimisation, compression, data-deduplication and application proxies to optimise application performance. Goodbye Global MPLS network. Goodbye expensive WAN Optimisation boxes. These technologies have been truly disrupted by a solution that is faster to install, easier to manage, cheaper… and performs better.
Then came Cloud…
And with Cloud, every “local” or “regional” MPLS network in Africa suddenly needed to connect to SaaS or PaaS environments located beyond the ocean. This changed everything. Most network applications were built to work here – close to home. Running services across 170 ms of latency is a whole new ballgame.
Most IT Managers took the plunge. The commercial enticement of saving on licensing was great. They started with email… moved it over to Office 365 or something similar. It worked – mostly. No serious issues – win for the IT Manager! Then they moved onto OneDrive, and Sharepoint and Skype-for-Business. The wheels came off, they incurred the wrath of users and superiors alike. Suddenly he or she does not know what they are doing. This is a scenario we have seen over and over again. Some companies even rolled back – re-deploying onsite Exchange servers, investing in additional local hosting and bidding Cloud farewell for the next 3 – 5 years (by which time their expensive new environments will be uncompetitively obsolete).
Aryaka solved the problem for Global Networks back in 2009. You are now one of them. Let Aryaka make your Cloud solutions work. Azure works twice as fast on half the bandwidth. O365 downloads are up to 40 times faster.
Don’t go through the motions of MPLS, Internet VPNs, ExpressRoute, WAN Optimisation kit…. Just come talk to us. We’ll make your Cloud services work.
