SOE_WAN_Report-2015

STATE OF THE ENTERPRISE WAN | 2015

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2015. Do not reproduce without prior permission.

S t a t e o f t h e E n t e r p r i s e W A N 2 0 1 5 | 1

Executive SummaryThe State of the Enterprise WAN is mixed. While certain components of the enterprise WAN are improving, others are actually hindering the enterprise’s ability to conduct business over the Internet, especially when application traffic must travel over long distances.

To gauge the State of the Enterprise WAN, we gathered anonymous, aggregated metrics from our own customer base. Aryaka pioneered the WAN as-a-Service space and delivers network optimization and application acceleration for the global enterprise to enable better collaboration, communication, and business productivity.

These services have attracted customers from all corners of the globe. Aryaka’s WAN as-a-Service solutions connect over 3000 customer sites across 50 countries in all six habitable continents. With such a large global network, connecting enterprise data centers to branch offices, enterprise sites to cloud providers, remote mobile workers to headquarters, and enterprise users to web applications in distant data centers, Aryaka is the only company in the world with the ability to aggregate incredibly detailed data about what’s happening, end-to-end, over the enterprise WAN.

These factors uniquely position Aryaka to see the end-to-end performance of the Enterprise WAN. A positive trend we observed is that first- and last-mile broadband links are improving. Enterprises are also continuing to migrate workloads to the cloud and shift away from on-premises applications in favor of cloud-based ones, and as they do, they’re learning about how important the WAN is to application performance.

Other trends are working against the enterprise as information travels over the WAN. Cloud-based video, teleconferencing, and other rich media gobble up an ever-increasing amount of bandwidth. Meanwhile, people are clogging the Internet nearly 24 hours a day, since we can now stream movies, post status updates, check email, and even create graphics-rich presentations from smartphones and tablets. Add in emerging trends, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications, and, as you can guess, B2B traffic tends to be what suffers the most.

For our second annual report, we investigate several factors that influence enterprise WAN performance. We look at everything from last-mile investments in APAC to packet loss statistics, from the most commonly used applications to cloud usage trends and more.

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One netwOrk fOr the enterprise

WAN as-a-Service

CDN as-a-Service

WAN Optimization as-a-Service

Aryaka’s groundbreaking WAN Optimization as-a-Service solution combines multi-tenant, purpose-built WAN Optimization technology with enterprise-grade connectivity via a dedicated, reliable, global core network. Our private core network is based on globally distributed POPs and innovative first-mile access technology, along with centralized WAN and application-layer visibility. It delivers LAN-like performance over the enterprise WAN without the expense of MPLS or the cost and hassle of WAN Optimization appliance solutions, all in a single, no CapEx monthly service.

Web Application Delivery as-a-Service

Aryaka’s Web Application Delivery as-a-Service is the world’s only Dynamic Site Acceleration solution built on a global private core network. Our solution provides enterprises with stable, consistent, and lightning-fast application performance that does not fall victim to the vagaries of the public Internet.

Network as-a-Service

Aryaka’s Network as-a-Service combines enterprise-grade, MPLS-like global private connectivity with proprietary TCP optimization and QoS. Utilizing a dedicated reliable core network based on globally distributed POPs and centralized WAN visibility, this service delivers predictable, high-performing network connections that you can deploy in minutes.

IP Application Delivery as-a-Service

Aryaka’s IP Application Delivery as-a-Service is a state-of-the-art acceleration solution, engineered to support enterprise mobility needs. The solution combines enterprise-grade global connectivity with optimization to offer remote and mobile users a superior way to access centralized enterprise resources.



Table of ConTenTs1. Introduction: Enterprise bandwidth demand climbs – again | Page 4

2. HTTP traffic continues to dominate – pointing towards heavy cloud adoption rates | Page 8

3. Data reduction improves the performance of key apps | Page 10

4. Cloud-scale technologies are accelerating globalization | Page 12

5. The public Internet is far from business-grade, especially over long distances | Page 17

6. Network problems in the middle mile kill application performance | Page 21

7. Cloud adoption is still on the rise worldwide | Page 23

8. Conclusion: Current trends highlight the need for quick-to-deploy, fully managed | Page 26 enterprise WAN services



InTroduCTIon: enTerprIse bandwIdTh demand ClImbs – agaIn

The State of the Enterprise WAN is improving, but this improvement comes with a series of caveats. First- and last-mile links are improving globally, espe-cially as governments in regions such as APAC invest in infrastructure, but that’s only a small part of the Internet overall.

The middle-mile, in contrast, is under siege. Demand for bandwidth is at an all-time high, and we’ll prob-ably be saying the same thing next year, and the year after, and so on. Demand is climbing and shows no signs of slowing down.

Telecommunications giants tend to funnel their investments towards the first- and last-mile because they own those pieces of the Internet. The middle of the Internet, however, is a shared medium, and as such, investments in it are modest. As bandwidth de-mands continue to rise, this problem will only worsen.

Today, there are approximately 3 billion people on-line, or roughly 40 percent of the global population. That’s up from less than a billion people online in 2005, or less than 16 percent of the world’s popula-tion.

By 2020, however, we should hit a global tipping point where more than 66 percent of the world’s population comes online, or roughly 5 billion people. This is the claim Peter Diamondis, founder and chair-man of the X PRIZE Foundation, makes in his new book Bold.

We agree with his assessment, although we would argue that with the accelerating adoption of smart-phones and tablets, Diamondis’ forecast is probably a conservative one. His estimate also doesn’t factor in all of the bandwidth being gobbled up by machines, as the Machine-to-Machine communications (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) trends pick up steam.

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Moreover, as ever more business is conducted online, B2B bandwidth demands continue to climb, as well. This is common sense. However, the 2000-era approach to this problem, simply adding capacity, is still the norm, despite the fact that this legacy approach is proving to be counter-productive.

What this means for the enterprise is that while everyone is clamoring for more bandwidth, there’s a negative and coincident trend we must mention: most IT budgets are flat or declining.

To make matters worse, the circa 2000-era approach to this problem, simply adding capacity, is still the norm, despite the fact that this legacy approach is proving to be counter-productive.

In recent years, researchers have studied the effect of adding more highway capacity in cities in order to ease congestion. The result? Congestion remains the same. More roads actually encourage more driving.

The same is true of our Internet Superhighways.

Where the comparison to highways stops, though, is that the enterprise has the ability to solve the problem. City commuters must rely on government

entities to build out and maintain transportation infrastructure. The enterprise does not need to.

What the enterprise must cope with is monopoly telcos that prioritize profit margins and their monopoly fiefdoms over all else.

As we compiled data for our report, we saw network traffic growing across all regions. For instance, North America bandwidth growth, while still high, is now outpaced by growth elsewhere in the world – as the rest of the world comes online at an accelerated rate.

To bypass those crowded, under-maintained public Internet highways – which kill the performance of cloud applications – most large enterprises rely on their own private highways, which in the past typically consisted of a combination of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) plus expensive WAN Optimization hardware.

Here’s the problem with that approach: it runs counter to another key enterprise trend, the widespread adoption of cloud services.

Figure 1 : Traffic Growth by Region: warning signs of a looming cloud crunch?

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The cloud is supposed to bring down costs, deliver agility, and enable a more nimble, flexible enterprise. If you have to travel over super expensive private networks and deploy equally expensive and complicated optimization hardware, the cost needle starts to point in the wrong direction.

MPLS unit prices are not likely to decline year-over-year to stay in line with flat budgets and growing demands for capacity. In fact, few enterprises are lucky to see MPLS costs declining by 10-15 percent per year, if at all. If this trend continues – and there is no reason to think it will not – smarter alternatives to private MPLS are needed to keep up with traffic growth across the new distributed, global, cloud-driven enterprise.

Simply put, doubling the bandwidth of expensive private WAN services like MPLS every 12-18 months is just not an option for most businesses.

And if we move our focus from North America to the rest of the world, these legacy approaches are non-starters.

One of the major traffic trends we observed is a rise in traffic from India, China, and other APAC locations accessing North American and EMEA data centers and cloud instances.

Judging from the traffic we observed, enterprises of all sizes in all sectors of the economy are increasingly looking for innovative ways, other than MPLS and VPNs, to connect with overseas sites.

Part of why this is happening is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, bandwidth at non-headquarters enterprise sites, which we refer to as “access sites” in this report, is actually reasonably good worldwide. Even in developing countries, access-site bandwidth is almost never below 2 Mbps (fewer than 3 percent of those links are below that threshold).

The chart below shows the average access WAN link size at locations around the globe.

(Note: For the WAN link charts below, we eliminated primary headquarter and primary data center sites, which generally have high-bandwidth data links and would skew the data. The sites represented are the remote access sites, such as branch offices, that are accessing applications located at headquarters and other centralized data center locations.)

Figure 2 : Average global “access site” WAN link speeds

(For a breakdown on each region, refer to section 4.)

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If we drill down further to determine the variation in demand for bandwidth across industries and verticals, we see a rather uneven distribution. While

some sectors saw a steep surge in bandwidth demand compared to last year, others grew more slowly.

The software vertical saw the highest growth in bandwidth demand, with demand more than doubling compared to last year. Manufacturing and Computer Hardware companies too saw a huge surge in bandwidth demand. Demand for bandwidth grew

in the financial sector as well. Bandwidth demand in other sectors including Technology, Healthcare, and Logistics remained more or less similar to that of last year.

Figure 3 : Average bandwidth demand across Industries

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88%

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HTTP

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hTTp and hTTps TraffIC ConTInues To domInaTe – poInTIng To heavy Cloud adopTIon raTes

Keeping pace with what we saw in last year’s report, HTTP and HTTPS traffic continues to dominate. What this indicates is, that applications are continuing to transition away from on-premises data centers, to web-based consumption and delivery models.

Developers and researchers have been forecasting this shift, and our data backs those predictions up.

The chart below shows the percentage of companies that use various applications. In other words, 88 percent of our enterprise customers send HTTP traffic over the WAN; 80 percent of them send HTTPS, while only 11 percent send specific application traffic like Microsoft DFS Replication.

(Note: For the application charts below, we eliminated applications that constituted less than 10% of traffic across the network)

Figure 4 : Application Usage



The next chart shows the percentage of traffic that each protocol or application represents overall. In other words, for those 88 percent of companies sending HTTP traffic, an average of 23 percent of all

traffic that each company individually sends over the Aryaka WAN is HTTP traffic. Adding HTTPS to this metric, many companies are seeing that 40 percent or more of their WAN traffic is HTTP-related.

For companies running CIFS (Common Internet File System, which is typically used for file access and remote printing in Microsoft Windows environments), 25 percent of their overall WAN traffic is CIFS. In

other words, for those 79 percent of companies sending CIFS traffic, a quarter of all traffic that each company individually sends over the Aryaka WAN is CIFS traffic.

Figure 5 : Top Applications as a Percentage of Traffic

24.8%

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CIFS HTTP HTTPS FTP MS RDP SSH SMTP MSSQL EPMAP DNS


S t a t e o f t h e E n t e r p r i s e W A N 2 0 1 5 | 1 0

daTa reduCTIon Improves The performanCe of key apps

As Big Data applications continue to grow in popularity, it’s no surprise that the demand for data is at all-time high, and could well increase at an exponential rate in coming years. The primary drivers for this increased demand for all types of data include globalization, increased cloud adoption, mobility, richer apps, and streaming videos, to name a few. In fact, many of these apps now have some sort of data collection and analytics features built into them.

Therefore, the only feasible solution enterprises are left with to counter this data explosion is figuring out how to navigate through middle-mile congestion efficiently, and the primary tool for this is WAN Optimization.

The principal goal of any WAN Optimization solution is to maximize the efficiency of the data flow across the enterprise network. Different vendors have different approaches to achieving that goal, but data reduction technologies and techniques remain at the core of any solution.

Among the many techniques leveraged in WAN Optimization solutions, data deduplication, compression, and caching account for a sizeable reduction in data flowing across a WAN pipe. Using these technologies, WAN Optimization vendors are able to provide not just bandwidth savings, but also the ability to accelerate application performance.

The data shows that, despite the talk around more application data being encrypted or pre-compressed, many protocols, including CIFS, HTTP, IMAP, and MSSQL, can still see bandwidth usage savings of 50 percent or more. With the right optimization technologies in place, data reduction can help enterprises keep up with skyrocketing bandwidth demands, at least in the short term. In the longer term, more advanced, unified approaches will be needed. Another noteworthy point here is that certain applications are far more compressible than others. Perforce, for instance, sees an average data reduction of 75 percent over our network.



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Figure 6 : Data Reduction



Cloud-sCale TeChnologIes are aCCeleraTIng globalIzaTIon

It’s not just big enterprises that are taking advantage of globalization trends anymore. Businesses of all sizes are outsourcing everything from call center support to general customer service to R&D.

At Aryaka, we are in a unique position to watch this trend evolve, since our flagship technology, WAN Optimization as-a-Service, was originally developed to help enterprises connect to distant, and often overseas, branch offices.

In fact, our entire portfolio of services is built on top of a private network made up of a global footprint of POPs, which are within 30 milliseconds of 90 percent of the world’s enterprise users. Aryaka’s WAN as-a-Service solutions connect over 3000 customer sites across 50 countries in all six habitable continents.

What we noticed long ago is that even large enterprises want to move away from outdated technologies like MPLS, WAN Optimization appliances, and commodity CDNs. For them, the reasons are usually more about flexibility and agility

than simply cost. For smaller businesses investigating these services for the first time, they now have access to technologies they simply couldn’t afford before.

Quite a few businesses are moving beyond IP VPNs to an enterprise-grade private network that has optimization built in to it, so as to mitigate the effects of latency, congestion, packet loss, and jitter. In other words, application performance for all users – no matter where in the world they are located – is the primary driver.

The use case for our initial customers was typically to use our network to tackle globalization challenges, accelerating their application traffic to employees, customers, and partners located far away from centralized servers. Fast forward to today, enterprises also use Aryaka’s technology to navigate far more complex use cases such as enterprise mobility and accelerating access to their workloads in public, private, and hybrid clouds.



In 2014, we again observed regional Internet bandwidth and speeds improving globally. Data shows that 67 percent of our customers use a high-speed Internet link (greater than or equal to 10 Mbps) for their last mile.

Meanwhile, 16 percent of our customer base uses very-high-speed Internet edge links (greater than 40

Mbps). On the negative side, congestion and packet loss on the unreliable Internet results in sub-optimal use of available bandwidth, so there is still plenty of room for improvement, even on the best parts of the Internet.

Broken down by region, EMEA locations have the highest percentage of high-speed access site last-mile WAN links. But, in line with last year’s trend

and owing to the improved quality of last-mile links globally, EMEA now lags behind the global average for very high-speed WAN links.

(Note: For the WAN link charts below, we eliminated primary headquarter and primary data center sites, which generally have high-bandwidth data links and would skew the data. These are the access sites, such as branch offices, that are accessing applications located at headquarters and centralized data center locations.)

Figure 7 : Average worldwide access site WAN link speeds

Figure 8 : WAN Link Size (Mbps) - EMEA

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North American access sites, while lagging behind EMEA slightly in regards to high-speed last-mile

links, actually have a higher percentage of very high-speed links.

Compared to last year, APAC has seen a substantial growth in very-high-speed WAN links, even surpassing EMEA and the global average. A full 21 percent of APAC sites have links >20 Mbps, up from 14 percent last year. Another thing to note in APAC

is that many sites (about 33 percent) still have low-speed connections of less than 10 Mbps. This indicates a huge amount of disparity among enterprises with offices in APAC.

Figure 9 : WAN Link Size (Mbps) - North America

Figure 10 : WAN Link Size (Mbps) - APAC

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While China and India are included in our overall APAC numbers, we also decided to look into each one of them separately. We believe stand-alone data from these high-growth, emerging economic behemoths has significance and points to globalization patterns that could be missed in regional data. Patterns for China mirror those of the APAC region as a whole,

showing considerable growth in very high-speed WAN links and significant disparity.

India also saw an increase in the percentage of very high-speed WAN links; however, 23 percent of Indian enterprises still rely on <4 Mbps WAN links.

Figure 11 : WAN Link Size (Mbps) - China

Figure 11 : WAN Link Size (Mbps) - India

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Looking at only high-speed and very high-speed last-mile access site connections, EMEA has the highest percentage of sites with connections greater than 10 Mbps. However, it has the lowest percentage of very high-speed (>40 Mbps) sites.

Worldwide, the percentage of sites in the 11-40 Mbps range is 24 percent, down from 29 percent last year,

but we believe that most of them have upgraded to very high-speed links, as we observed an equivalent increase in very high-speed sites compared to last year. 16 percent of sites worldwide, up from 12 percent last year, enjoy very high-speed connections of greater than 40 Mbps.

Thus, globally, high-speed plus very high-speed connections account for 40 percent of all sites connecting to the Aryaka network. This is similar to what we saw last year. Sites with 11-40 Mbps are

fairly consistent worldwide, accounting for roughly a quarter of all sites, no matter which region you look at.

The chart above tabulates the WAN link sizes for our top 5 verticals. Companies in the Technology sector have the highest demand for very high-speed WAN links, while Logistics companies are skewed towards medium-to-low speed links, typically 10 Mbps or

less. More than half of the links in the Healthcare, Software, and Technology sectors rely on high-speed or very high-speed WAN links. Overall, Software companies have the highest demand for high-speed WAN links.

Table 1 : EMEA has the highest percentage of high-speed access site links

Table 3 : EMEA has the highest percentage of high-speed access site links

Table 2 :North America has the highest percentage of very high-speed access site links

Region/Country%Above 10 Mbps

(<40Mbps)Overall 24%EMEA 26%APAC 25%North America 24%China 23%India 21%

Region/Country %Above 40 Mbps

Overall 16%China 18%North America 18%APAC 16%India 15%EMEA 13%

Healthcare Logistics Manufacturing Software Technology<2 0% 10% 2% 0% 02-4 5% 46% 17% 7% 4%5-9 5% 10% 11% 14% 13%10 33% 20% 32% 20% 23%11-20 24% 3% 16% 36% 19%21-40 19% 3% 9% 11% 4%41-99 5% 2% 9% 7% 19%100 10% 5% 5% 5% 17%



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< 0.5% Bad minutes 0.5% - 2.0% Badminutes

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> 5.0% Bad minutes

Global

The publIC InTerneT Is far from busIness-grade, espeCIally over long dIsTanCes

For this report, Aryaka measured anonymized enterprise WAN traffic from 3,000 customer sites using the Internet links between enterprise locations and the nearest Aryaka POP in order to measure the quality of last-mile Internet connections. Aryaka has partnered with Tier 1 ISPs, so that our POPs have multiple, redundant high-bandwidth Internet pipes that branch offices can connect to. Therefore, network performance between Aryaka POPs and end user

locations, most of which are within 30 milliseconds or less from the nearest POP, is an excellent indicator of last-mile Internet link quality.

Aryaka’s architecture generates ping-based measurements on each link once per second, which is an efficient and optimal method to measure packet loss, especially for small packets. It also measures TCP retransmissions, which is a good way to measure packet loss for larger packets. Here’s what we found:

Figure 12 : Last Mile Link Quality



Last-mile link quality is measured in units of “bad minutes.” We define a “bad minute” as one where, either measured ping packet loss exceeds 4 percent or where ping packet loss exceeds 1 percent and TCP retransmissions exceed 3 percent. During a bad minute enterprises will not get the application performance that they need to function smoothly at optimal productivity levels.

Experiencing a bad minute every once in a while – say, less than 0.5 percent of the time – is unlikely to cause issues in delivering high-quality, consistent application performance. The more frequently bad

minutes occur, however, the greater the risk that users will frequently report application performance problems.

Globally, 78 percent of the sites overall experienced <0.5% bad minutes.

As one might expect, the percentage of sites experiencing a relatively large amount of bad minutes in regions like North America and EMEA is low. A big surprise when comparing data to last year, however, is the fact that last-mile link quality has actually degraded for EMEA.

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Figure 13 : Last Mile Link Quality - North America

Figure 14 : Last Mile Link Quality - EMEA



We have included India and China in our APAC numbers, but we also decided to look into each one of them separately.

APAC has seen a sound improvement in the quality of last-mile links, with bad minutes of >2 percent dropping significantly from a quarter last year to just about 12 percent this year.

The improvement in quality of last-mile links in China is considerable, which pulls up the APAC numbers overall. Bad minutes greater than 2 percent saw a

steep drop from 32 percent last year to just 10 percent this year.

While the last-mile link quality improved the world over, the same cannot be said for India. Even though the percentage of bad minutes greater than 2 percent

remained about the same as last year, the chart this year is skewed towards unacceptably high bad minutes of greater than 5 percent.

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Figure 15 : Last Mile Link Quality - APAC

Figure 16 : Last Mile Link Quality - China



The above charts indicate that, overall, unaided last-mile business Internet connectivity is reasonably good in most places around the globe. This suggests that the last-mile edge connection is not an inhibitor to file transfers, email usage, surfing the web, and accessing nearby applications.

Also, if you look at the charts above, enterprise sites in the first column are seeing what is essentially L2 or MPLS-like last-mile quality, which confirms our thesis that last-mile links across short distances behave very similar to private links with dedicated bandwidth in most parts of the world. Application performance over the Internet when traffic crosses oceans is entirely a different matter, however, since the public Internet tends to perform poorly over long distances owing to high levels of congestion and packet loss.

For APAC overall, the number of unacceptable bad minutes experienced at various locations is still high,

with 7 percent of sites experiencing bad minutes more than 5 percent of the time. The number of sites experiencing high numbers in terms of bad minutes (2-5 percent) has gone down dramatically from 16 percent last year to a mere 5 percent this year, showcasing the significant investments APAC governments are channeling in to telecommunications infrastructure.

India is not keeping pace with the rest of the region, however, with a combined 20 percent of all sites having poor last-mile connections that need some form of optimization – even over the short last-mile hop.

To conclude, overall unaided last-mile Internet quality without optimization is decent for almost all global locations. For some locations however, especially in APAC, last-mile connectivity that is not optimized is still a source of application performance issues.

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Figure 17 : Last Mile Link Quality - India



neTwork problems In The mIddle mIle kIll applICaTIon performanCe

Latency and bandwidth limitations are not the only bad guys when it comes to delivering acceptable application performance over the Internet. Congestion and packet loss are the real villains, and the public Internet is their breeding ground. Congestion and packet loss aggravate the effects of latency when it comes to moving data across long-haul international links. In fact, congestion-based packet loss problems affect application performance even more, as the distance between the client and server grows. Even though Internet quality continues to improve on the last mile, the middle mile is, more often than not, the true bottleneck. The problem can be traced to congested ports or peering points where local ISPs hand off traffic to other networks. In other cases, such as MPLS, the speed of light barrier still limits throughput and performance over the WAN.

Last-mile issues combined with the equivalent of a cobblestone-paved middle mile result in application performance that is not viable for today’s agile enterprise ecosystem. Productivity takes a hit, costs

go up, and profit margins shrink as a result of poor application performance.

Furthermore, as more and more applications as well as enterprise workloads move from behind the firewall and into the cloud, traditional networks and optimization technologies fail to deliver on their promises, causing the situation to worsen. This is what’s causing the most worry for CIOs, IT Directors, and Network Managers today.

Let’s dig deeper into the packet-loss statistics. The numbers in the next chart indicate that most last-mile Internet connections work well. Enterprises typically see less than 0.25 percent packet loss on the last-mile link, even in places like China and India. The global median packet loss is a mere 0.04 percent. In practice, TCP applications can handle packet loss rates of about 1% over any given time period before application performance seriously degrades. And the very nature of TCP is designed to cause some packet loss in order to efficiently use available bandwidth.



However, many Network Managers assume (wrongly) that if packet loss is less than 1 percent on their enterprise WAN, things are fine. The reality could be very different – especially if you ask the application end users. Unfortunately, IT usually finds this fact out the hard way.

Once you drill down into specific network metrics, network quality varies greatly across regions, and it can vary within those regions as well, depending on the diversity of providers in the region and how well they peer with one another. It can also vary depending on the time of day. For instance, quality takes a serious hit during business hours, as the amount of congestion increases.

The link quality data here only represents the last-mile packet loss. But the last mile usually isn’t the problem, since the farther packets travel, the more middle-mile loss (in addition to any last-mile loss) you can expect, even over private circuits like MPLS. More importantly, the more packet loss that occurs anywhere on the network, the more end users will see application performance drop.

If you deliver applications hosted in North America to an end user based out of India or vice versa, the performance will be significantly lower than if the same application were delivered over the LAN or even within the continent.

The traditional way to avoid the effects of a congested WAN starts with simply adding more capacity. For more complex WAN topologies (and for organizations with higher budgets), strategies include optimizing

traffic through compression, de-duplication, application-specific acceleration proxies, and other WAN Optimization techniques.

However, when done only at customer end points, these optimization solutions have limits in terms of how much they can address performance over the WAN. And when one end point is in a public, private, or hybrid cloud, an appliance-based solution rarely works. Adding boxes to the enterprise networking ecosystem also adds complexity, CapEx costs related to the hardware, and ongoing support and maintenance efforts.

A superior approach is one delivered from an optimized, intelligent, cloud based WAN as-a-Service platform, such as the one delivered by Aryaka, which we’ll discuss in our conclusion.

1.01%

0.65%

1.37%

1.15%1.06%

2.20%

0.00%

0.50%

1.00%

1.50%

2.00%

2.50%

Overall North America EMEA APAC China India

Mean Median

Figure 18 : Packet loss per region



Cloud adopTIon Is sTIll on The rIse worldwIde Cloud adoption continues to rise worldwide, now more rapidly than ever. Last year, we noticed an interesting trend: a notable segment of our enterprise customer base was adopting cloud services, and of those early adopters, many were already investing in accelerated network access to cloud services to provide a seamless experience to all their global users.

In 2014, that trend continued. More than 15 percent of our customers are now accelerating access to cloud

services via Aryaka. If this trend remains steady, the cloud will become the default way of delivering applications in future. Along with an increase in raw adoption, we have also observed a significant increase in the willingness to adopt private – and hybrid – cloud models. Enterprises fear that if they do not start figuring out a workable cloud strategy now, they run the risk of losing out to their cloud-savvy competition.

Companies using accelerated cloud

access15%

Others85%

Companies using acceleratedcloud access

Others

Figure 19 : Percentage of Companies Using Accelerated Cloud Access



It’s important to note, as you read this report, that the cloud-access section is not necessarily representative of the overall enterprise cloud migration and cloud-usage patterns. In fact, we believe our customer base foreshadows trends that will spike in coming years.

Remember, Aryaka is a cloud-based WAN as-a-Service company. Our customers, obviously, aren’t reluctant to switch to cloud-based tools that outperform legacy technologies. In fact, considering our unique value proposition of providing accelerated network access to any cloud service, our customers could even be considered aggressive early adopters of cloud services, since they prioritize cloud performance and performance predictability in their IT objectives.

While our customers are clearly blazing the path to cloud adoption and are ahead of the curve, they provide a glimpse of the future, showing us all where the enterprise WAN is headed.

We are not alone in the belief that our customers are foreshadowing tomorrow’s status quo. Analyst firms and major technology incumbents have identified complementary trends in their various studies. For

instance, IDC in its Cloud Predictions for 2015 has revealed that more than 65 percent of enterprise IT organizations will commit to hybrid cloud technologies before 2016.

Cloud adoption is on the rise across market sectors too. Gartner’s latest estimates (Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2012-2018, 4Q14 Update) find that the global public cloud market is expected to reach at least $191 billion by 2020.

The next chart, then, is a deeper dive into the traffic patterns of the enterprises that are accelerating cloud access over Aryaka. The chart shows the percentage of cloud traffic versus all other WAN traffic.

One interesting observation to note here is that the companies that have a high percentage of cloud traffic relative to total WAN traffic are also investing in acceleration services. From this, it’s fairly easy to conclude that network performance problems are holding back cloud app adoption. Nearly 49 percent of all traffic from these companies is accelerated cloud traffic, implying that these companies are serious about their investments in cloud services.

48.8%

51.2%

Accelerated Cloud Traffic

All other traffic

Figure 20 : Accelerated Cloud Traffic - Mean



As we dug deeper into the data, we found that the median percentage of cloud traffic vs. all other traffic was actually 50.5 percent, a bit higher than the 48.8 percent average shown above. A probable reason for this slight difference is that companies that are currently in the process of transitioning from on-premises applications to cloud, will only have a very small percentage of their total traffic in the cloud, which slightly skews the results.

Another important thing we should note here is that the cloud traffic in the chart represents only accelerated cloud access. If a company is using, say,

Salesforce.com or Google Apps and routing that traffic directly to the Internet from their locations instead of routing it through the Aryaka core, that traffic will not have been counted in this percentage. This implies that an even higher percentage of the total WAN traffic for these enterprises might be going to cloud services. The reason why enterprises have such a significant percentage of accelerated cloud traffic is because most cloud services are centrally hosted and hence need optimization in order to provide a smooth experience to users across geographies.

50.5%49.5% Accelerated Cloud Traffic

All other traffic

Figure 20 : Accelerated Cloud Traffic - Median



ConClusIon: CurrenT Trends hIghlIghT The need for quICk-To-deploy, fully managed enTerprIse wan servICesIT organizations today are under more pressure than ever. CIOs and IT managers must cope with shrinking CapEx budgets, the rising adoption of cloud services, globalization, shrinking IT workforces but continuously increasing workloads, and the expectation that IT can handle everything from Big Data applications to security to network monitoring – all while ensuring a great end user experience. Add it up, and IT needs quick, easy-to-deploy, easy-to-manage (or zero management) solutions.

On the networking side, IT needs to find flexible and scalable networking solutions that can keep pace with the demands of a rapidly growing enterprise user base and that can support any sudden increase in data volume. The old model of adding more bandwidth, deploying MPLS, or installing optimization appliances does not work anymore. It is labor intensive and requires IT to continuously focus on network maintenance and management instead of spending time on innovative and strategic projects.

As more workloads and applications move to the cloud, the public Internet itself has become a major bottleneck. Users have come to expect LAN-like speeds – for everything – and when an organization fails to deliver, user satisfaction and productivity drops. Even the biggest enterprises with the deepest pockets will not be able to pay for point-to-point private lines to every single workload and application they use in the cloud, from Microsoft Azure to Amazon Web Services to Office 365 to Salesforce.com to industry-specific applications. You would need a gigantic budget to keep up.

To ensure a smooth transfer of all enterprise applications and workloads to the cloud, the focus has now turned to the WAN and how it can be overhauled to accommodate the dynamic requirements of the modern enterprise. The unaided Internet last-mile links may not be reliable and predictable, but they have improved significantly over the last decade. However, as discussed above, when traffic crosses regions or travels to offices an ocean away, application performance drops significantly.



When middle-mile congestion problems are factored in, combined with globalization and rising cloud adoption, enterprise WAN performance suffers even more. Growing bandwidth demands aren’t being met with an increase in IT budgets, nor is the cost of MPLS coming down quickly enough to allow IT budgets to keep pace.

The growing diversity of cloud workloads and increasing M&A activities are two more factors that make it difficult for the enterprise to predict traffic patterns. IT is also already struggling to cope with ever-increasing end-user demand for better performance and faster response times, whether those end users are employees, customers, partners, contractors, or anyone else granted access to centralized web, cloud, or on-premises applications. With fixed bandwidth MPLS links that have long deployment times, it becomes nearly impossible for enterprise CIOs to keep up with the fast-changing needs of their organizations.

What we found when analyzing the traffic traveling over the Aryaka network is a confirmation that a multi-segment architecture enables enterprises to address the congestion and quality issues many last-mile Internet links face, while avoiding Internet middle-mile issues completely and achieving superior performance over long distances.

Enterprises want an agile WAN architecture that can be provisioned fast and is cost-effective.

Aryaka delivers just that. With a globally distributed footprint of POPs situated close to end user locations, a dedicated private core network with built-in optimization, and redundant network and IP connectivity from top tier network providers, Aryaka answers the challenge through its multi-segment architecture.

Aryaka’s multi-segment architecture delivers the following benefits:

• Virtually eliminates middle-mile packet loss

• Minimizes the amount of last-mile loss

• Minimizes the impact of last-mile loss on application performance, when it does occur

• Works equally well for enterprise site-to-site as well as site-to-cloud service/SaaS connectivity

These factors, among others, are why Gartner has positioned Aryaka as a “visionary” in its Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization Controllers for three consecutive years.

Approaches like Aryaka’s WAN as-a-Service platform are needed to ensure acceptable application performance on a future-proofed enterprise WAN.



About AryakaAryaka, the pioneer of WAN as-a-Service, delivers network optimization and application acceleration for the global enterprise, for better collaboration, communication, and business productivity. Aryaka eliminates the need for costly WAN appliances and long-haul private links. Aryaka’s groundbreaking WAN Optimization as-a-Service accelerates any application to any location and provides organizations with an affordable, optimized, and fully meshed network to access on-premises applications, as well as cloud services. Aryaka’s Application Delivery as-a-Service enables globally distributed employees, customers, partners, and mobile end users to quickly access centralized enterprise applications and public-facing web resources from anywhere in the world. All services provide end-to-end visibility with 24×7 world-class support.

www.aryaka.com

https://twitter.com/aryakanetworks

https://www.facebook.com/aryakanetworks

https://www.linkedin.com/company/aryaka-networks

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