Aryaka and Alibaba have partnered with the goal of tapping into the growing demand for SD-WAN, especially with cloud-first enterprise. But why is SD-WAN in such demand and who are the other players in the space?
Internet outages, poor network performance, and slow network setup are now of a bygone era. The promising Software-defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) has revolutionized the tech industry with its higher performance, secure network connection, and faster speed offerings. In recent years, SD-WAN has grown popular due to the upsurge of modern technologies such as cloud migrationOpens a new window , 5G, AI, and IoT. According to the Futuriom reportOpens a new window , by 2023, the global SD-WAN market will swell to $4.6 billion. Furthermore, due to the work from home scenario courtesy of COVID-19, SD-WAN market is flourishing even more.
Noticing the upsurge demand for SD-WAN has witnessed over the months, managed SD-WAN provider Aryaka announced a strategic partnership with Chinese public cloud company Alibaba. The alliance will allow Alibaba customers to utilize Aryaka’s end-to-end global WAN, and Alibaba will offer Aryaka’s SmartServices portfolio from its marketplace through the joint reseller partner, Netbank.
Matt Carter, CEO of Aryaka, saysOpens a new window , “The combination of the world’s best managed SD-WAN provider and Alibaba Cloud will help deliver a truly Cloud-First WAN to enterprises, modernizing their WANs.â€
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The Rise of SD-WAN
In the past, traditional networks stumbled to support modern technologies, and enterprises needed a flexible, reliable, and secure network to meet the demands of their growing business needs. Meet SD-WAN. It complements the rise of cloud computing and erases the bottlenecks and complexities around the traditional network.
A traditional Wide Area Network (WAN) comprises routers, switches, multiplexers, and other hardware to manage the network infrastructure. However, the software-powered technology, SD-WAN, eliminates all these through its virtualized architecture. Designed to support applications hosted in on-premises, SD-WAN uses a centralized controller that intelligently optimizes and directs the traffic across the WAN. This, in turn, increases application performance, business agility, and reduces IT spending without compromising security or data privacyOpens a new window . Some of the top SD-WAN vendors are Cisco, Silver Peak, Citrix, Huawei, Verizon, VMWare, and Fortinet.
One of the main reasons Alibaba partnered with Aryaka is to empower enterprise customers with application performance. A key challenge post-cloud migration is that cloud applications become slow, impacting the user experience. A fully managed global SD-WAN architecture such as the one offered by Aryaka minimizes latency and provides direct connectivity to IaaS, SaaS, UCaas providers for optimal application performance.
Selina Yuan, President of International Business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence says, “By combining Aryaka’s technology with Alibaba Cloud’s robust network infrastructure, customers will be able to achieve unparalleled application performance through this partnership in China and globally,â€
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