WAN

Mitigating latency and packet loss: Witch WAN warlock?

David Trossell, CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks This Halloween, the WAN witches are looking forward to a night of mischief, and this year the warlocks have turned off the TV to join in. While children are looking forward to trick and treating, streaming services, e-commerce operations, such as Amazon, are preparing to sell their wares. However, the gremlins that could stop them remain wide area network (WAN) latency and packet loss. Art by Alishia Hoyle These are two ghouls that can impact the largest corporate WAN, slowing down downloads and uploads to the extent that the enjoyment of streaming services could be marred by jitter. Even if watching scary movies isn’t your thing and you need to send ever increasing volumes of data from one side of the world to the other over a WAN for backing up or restoring, latency and packet loss can render any prospect of this impossible. Slow data transfers also pose a potential security risk, particularly if the data is being transferred to different clouds, which means there is a need to have the ability to send and receive data securely and at speed over long distances. The spell that is typically seen as the answer is in the form of SD-WANs, and increasingly, Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is being deployed. The trouble is that even the most experienced network witch or warlock can find their Halloween operations jeopardised by latency and packet loss. So, they have been looking beyond their cauldrons, as they’ve heard that it’s possible to benefit from SD-WANs that add a WAN Acceleration Overlay. After all, there is much money to be made from fun scary moments. Spending to rise In the US, the National Retail Federation (the NRF) forecasts that spending over the Halloween period will reach a record of $12.2bn, exceeding last year’s record of $10.6bn. This is according to the NRF’s annual survey, which was conducted by Prosper Insights and Analytics. “A record number of people (73%) will participate in Halloween-related activities this year, up from 69% in 2022,” it predicts. In the UK, an analysis by Finder suggests that spending in the country will reach over £1bn in 2023. It finds that 56% of Brits are planning to make a purchase and adds, “Planned Halloween spending for 2023 is projected to be 38% higher than Finder’s original estimate of £777 million based on past spending.” Data analysis accuracy From an e-commerce perspective, latency and packet loss can render big data analysis less accurate. Saras Analytics comments, “Data latency is the time it takes for your data to become available in your database or data warehouse after an event occurs. Data latency can affect the quality and accuracy of your data analytics, as well as the performance of your data-driven applications. Therefore, it is important to measure and optimise data latency in your data warehouse.” In some circumstances, downtime or poor database synchronisation could cause regulatory compliance issues, such as a failure to comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations. This can lead to an organisation being heavily fined. Poor WAN performance can render big data analysis inaccurate, leading to the lightning of poor decision-making and sub-optimal strategies, as well as ineffective corporate strategies. Quite often, with big data analysis, real-time data is required to make instant decisions, or in the case of e-commerce, to make accurate predictions of what customers really want to buy. Slow network performance could even be life-threatening. Autonomous vehicles (or autonomous broomsticks) are a case in point, they need accurate data to make decisions themselves and to be able to react to different circumstances and road conditions. For safety reasons, automakers are designing connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) to operate, even when there is no network connection. Cyber security: More trick than treat Then there is the issue of cyber security. Halloween can be more trick than treat when it comes to cyber attacks. FIDO Alliance puts the tricks used by cyber criminals into several categories: the wolf in sheep’s clothing, where wolves, including fraudsters who could be lurking behind friendly online chats; the ghosts of phishmas past, such as a phishing email or text message asking someone to confirm their personal details; the shapeshifter, deepfake audio and video that aim to get the viewer to give away sensitive information; the terminator, a social engineering attack that may use artificial intelligence and machine learning to spear phish the victim to encourage that person to share sensitive information. With each of these, fraudsters feel treated when they successfully manage to get access to passwords. A report by VEEAM highlights why the most sensitive data needs to be air-gapped. In its ‘2023 Ransomware Trends Report’, which involves interviews with 350 IT leaders whose organisations have survived a cyber attack, 93% of these attacks are aimed to destroy back-up data. Only 13% of these were able to recover their systems, data and operations without paying a ransom, while 20% of those that did pay a ransom still couldn’t recover their data. VEEAM therefore advises organisations to be relentless with security, as it finds that, “44% of organisations first restored to a sandbox before production”. Organisations also need to limit their risk exposure. This is particularly critical, as it finds that 56% of organisations run the risk of re‑infection during restoration. It also argues that recovery is everything because, “60% believe a significant overhaul is needed between backup and security teams.” WAN acceleration Part of that overhaul should include WAN Acceleration. It deploys artificial intelligence, machine learning and data parallelisation to expedite encrypted data over wide area networks. It doesn’t compete with SD-WANs, since it can be overlayed onto them, allowing faster and more secure back-ups and restoring, as well as providing more accurate data analysis, since it mitigates latency and packet loss. As a technology, it can work with any old and existing infrastructure. This is crucial because buying bigger pipes doesn’t necessarily increasing bandwidth utilisation, nor tackle latency and packet loss. In contrast, WAN Acceleration can increase bandwidth utilisation by up to 98%. This news has led three witches to ask: “Witch WAN Warlock?” The answer has to be a combination of SD-WANs and WAN Acceleration. It’s a solution that’s more treat than trick. WAN Acceleration accelerates data transfer speeds up to 200x faster than traditional WAN optimisation technologies, while enabling the transmission of encrypted data at speed, and that’s something that traditional WANop can’t do. Organisations can accelerate their WAN by using the spell of WAN acceleration to increase the performance of their organisation, and bring sunshine rather than thunder, lightning and rain to your customers and operations over the Halloween period and beyond.

Deliberations on WAN performance: Identifying needs

By David Trossell, CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks and Graham Jarvis, Technology Journalist Wide Area Networks run the world. The most famous of which is the internet. Just about every person and organisation depends on it. Without the web, the world would just grind to halt, and that’s what can happen to individuals and organisations when they are blighted by network latency, packet loss and poor bandwidth utilisation. Robert Sturt, Founder of Netify, looks at what SD-WANs are and what they can replace. He suggests that organisations need to examine their implementation and deployment strategies, as SD-WANs are cloud-first and they employ intelligent application routing across WANs. He considers bandwidth and the optimisation of traffic, arguing that SD-WANs can help to select the optimal route for any type of traffic, based on configuration and policies. For other factors, organisations should consider include granular Quality-of-Service (QoS); DIY vs managed SD-WAN; private backbone; public gateway or VPN; integration with cloud marketplaces; SASE and added security. Beyond SD-WANs What he misses out, is why SD-WANs are often not enough. Yes, they are a great technology, but they can often also benefit from WAN Acceleration overlays. WAN Acceleration can also be deployed aside from any SD-WAN. So, how an organisation goes about boosting their WAN performance should consider more than just one technology to ensure that its data can travel across efficiently at speed, with latency as well as packet loss minimised, while maximising bandwidth utilisation. To find out how they can achieve a secure and highly performant WAN, organisations should conduct and audit and where possible, conduct proofs of concept. Before that, David Trossell, CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks, urges organisations to go back to basics. That means asking questions about what problems are impacting WAN performance or functionality. This is crucial because once we have these facts, we can then start to review the technologies in terms of how this will affect the key issues with the current WAN setup. Now, the first tool that organisations tend to migrate to is SD-WANs. They are well publicised as the answer. However, not every issue will be resolved with its implementation. The trouble is that there are many myths surrounding SD-WANs. David explains, “First up, will it solve latency issue? Well, latency is latency! It’s a fact of life and the greatest fixed constant in the universe – the speed of light. Nobody has found a method of increasing it, and latency is the biggest killer of performance. What is worse is if you add a small sprinkling of packet loss as well, it compounds the effect of latency. Typically, a 10ms of latency will rob you of 90% of your performance.” Tuning WAN performance There are several options for tuning WAN performance that organisations could consider with SD-WANs. These include having layers of WANs, such as MPLS, a dedicated WAN connection to the internet or broadband. Yet, they are often prone to congestion, reliability issues and adverse changes in latency. The greater the distance, the greater the latency with broadband connections. Despite these challenges, there are resolutions that can help to mitigate the effects of latency and packet loss. They enable the intelligent routing of data to prioritise traffic on these links. One of the most common techniques for this is deduplication. David says, “This works extremely well with files or data that are compressible or traverse the WAN frequently. However, this does not work well with encrypted or pre-compressed files, such as PDF files. As many organisations now have a policy of encrypting traffic over their LAN, this is going to negate any benefit from data deduplication when the files traverse the WAN.” All organisations have time-sensitive data, or data that has a higher level of importance. This includes reconciliation back to the head office and this is where a QoS option may be advantageous. The trouble is that IT estates aren’t static, they are always changing because new users, offices, data flows, cloud migrations and offside back-ups all demand changes to SD-WAN setups. Building skills and efficiency David stresses that while SD-WANs are easy to setup and deploy, "it still takes time to build these skills and maintain the efficiency of the configuration. It’s about time these SD-WANs incorporated AI to lessen the burden on the network administrator. That said, SD-WANs have been a great step forward for WAN management. “With the constant need to transport data over WANs over increasing distance, as we move data around the world for processing, two factors need to be addressed: speed and security.” Latency and packet loss are the most critical factors to address. If organisations fail to address them, they will not see an exponential increase in WAN performance, nor increase their bandwidth utilisation with their existing WANs. By mitigating them, it’s possible to maximise WAN performance, even at higher speed bandwidths, which are now available to organisations at more sensible prices than in the past. The trouble is that most customers are only obtaining a fraction of the data and traffic throughput over their existing WANs – wasting money (ROI), as they are not able to fully utilise their existing bandwidth to its fullest. This increases the time it takes to transfer and receive data. He adds, “Whilst deduplication can be employed within the SD-WAN appliance to give a level of performance increase, this tends to be at the lower WAN bandwidths. This is because as we increase the WAN bandwidth, we start to consume more and more CPU and memory cycles managing the deduplication process. “I’m a great fan of SD-WANs they provide great flexibility and the auto roll-out is a great bonus to travelling around updating routers and firewalls. But they do have their limitations and maximising the throughput is one of the major issues. To release the full performance of the WANs, we need to tackle the to two factors that seriously affect performance: latency and packet loss. The technology that addresses these two issues  head on is WAN Acceleration.” WAN Acceleration camps WAN Acceleration falls into one of two camps: Those that use UDP and those that use TCP/IP to transfer data over the WAN. Organisations can use TCP/IP as an accelerator if that is the cause of the problem. He adds, “The UDP products tackle the latency issue by bypassing TCP/IP and just firing our UDP packets as fast as they can. However, packets will be lost and it is up to the source and destination programs to sort out what went missing and resend them.”  He also finds that the downside of this is that it takes up memory and CPU cycles. This limits the bandwidth capability, and they create their own cut-down version of TCP/IP. As for TCP/IP, there are usually several virtual connections opened between the source and the destination. Transmission begins when the first connection is made, and after it receives the acknowledgement (ACK) signal. It can then send more data along the second connection, and so on until the pipe has been filled up to the point of reaching the maximum capacity of the WAN. The benefits of this approach include a low CPU and memory overhead because he explains that it makes use of the new network cards. They offload tasks from the CPU. He explains, “These can scale to 80GB and above, and with all that spare CPU and memory we now have, we can add AI to manage the whole process including packet loss mitigation." WAN Acceleration: data agnostic WAN Acceleration is comparatively data agnostic. It means that the performance of those products, such as PORTrockIT, is not governed by the deduplication ration. The data is not manipulated in any way. It can be received in any form: compressed or encrypted. No data is touched, and time to transfer is repeatable. All this is achieved without agents on the servers or clients. As a process, it’s totally transparent. When we combine SD-WANs and WAN Acceleration, he suggests that, “we have a much more powerful solution because time-sensitive data transfers, such as offsite backup, recovery and data distribution, can now be achieved with encryption.” Together they can enable cross-site backups to reduce the cost of cloud-based solutions, even across continents.  "Even though we have the best solution when we combine WAN-Acceleration with SD-WAN, there is a limitation with this solution and that is the throughput performance of SD-WANs devices. Currently, there are few SD-WAN devices that have capability over 10GBs.” Data type, data usage and performance When considering how to improve and maximise WAN performance, there is a need to consider the data type, the data usage and the performance requirements of the organisation and its WANs. By taking latency and packet loss into consideration, organisations can apply solutions to maximise WAN as well as data performance and bandwidth utilisation. WAN Acceleration is great to have when organisations move up into the high bandwidths with more performance requirements over WANs that suffer from higher latency. With even higher performance requirements, organisations need to deploy WAN Acceleration direct access across the WAN (via firewalls). Key to this determination is the identification of needs. Click here for more latest news.

Epsilon and ExodusClouds to boost global enterprise connectivity

ExodusClouds has partnered with Epsilon Telecommunications to boost its global connectivity offering for enterprises across multiple industry verticals. ExodusClouds will serve enterprise customers across the telecommunications, finance, healthcare, education and manufacturing sectors with a white-labelled version of Epsilon’s NaaS platform, Infiny. Infiny will help connect enterprise customers to Epsilon’s ecosystem of 300+ data centres and 600+ leading cloud, IX, network and technology partners. The company is utilising Epsilon’s global last mile capabilities to level up its solutions including SD-WAN. It is also helping its enterprise customers to grow beyond its existing markets of Turkey, the Middle East and Africa, with a global reach. ExodusClouds aims to simplify the increasingly complex cloud networking ecosystem with software-driven solutions based on automation, orchestration and on-demand scalability. It provides high-performance infrastructure and connectivity to 150+ cloud service providers. Epsilon is helping ExodusClouds to extend its global reach via its MEF-certified network and suite of connectivity solutions, all within a single platform. By partnering with Epsilon, ExodusClouds can access a suite of solutions on Infiny in addition to cloud connect, including high performance data centre interconnection, access to internet exchanges and global inbound numbers. Infiny makes it simple for ExodusClouds to quickly pivot and scale its offerings in response to changing enterprise demands across multiple industries. Click here for latest data centre news.

LiveAction partners with Multipoint Group

LiveAction has announced its partnership with Multipoint Group, a provider of network and communications solutions. With a primary focus on Israel, Turkey, Greece and Cyprus, it will deliver LiveAction’s full product portfolio in addition to technical and sales support. The offering will include LiveAction’s network performance management (NPM) solutions. Its network intelligence platform transforms complex data into actionable insights, providing organisations with a comprehensive view of their network. NetOps professionals can rapidly take action to resolve network issues at scale, increase employee productivity, and reduce business risk. Its LiveNX NPM platform enables comprehensive network observability that spans the entire network – on-premises, WAN, SD-WAN, cloud, or hybrid. The LiveWire packet capture solution solves complex network events faster with forensic-level analytics that help eliminate blind spots in any network. “There’s a massive opportunity for LiveAction and our partners in these regions. Our partnership with Multipoint not only plays an important role in our growth into new verticals and geographies, but it upholds our commitment to providing our partners and customers with end-to-end performance visibility,” says Luke Millar, EMEA Channel Director, LiveAction. “Partnering with LiveAction delivers on our commitment to pursue the Mediterranean markets with the aim of helping a broad range of partners and customers take advantage of LiveAction’s network performance monitoring and security solutions to gain visibility into their networks and remediate problems quickly,” says Ricardo Resnik, CEO, Multipoint. Click here for latest data centre news.

Cato Networks has announced a new SASE throughput record, achieving 5Gbps on a single encrypted tunnel with all security inspections enabled. “Once again, Cato has set the mark for SASE at scale,” says Gur Shatz, Co-Founder, President, and COO of Cato Networks. "Pushing the boundary of SASE throughput worldwide is more than an engineering achievement. It demonstrates how quickly a platform with a cloud-native architecture can make new technology globally available."  As larger enterprises adopt SASE, higher capacity connections are needed for interconnecting data centres and private clouds. Cato meets that need with leading support for 5Gbps throughput on a single, encrypted tunnel regardless of security inspections. Previously, Cato supported a maximum of 3Gbps per tunnel. The improved throughput underscores the benefits of a cloud-native architecture. It nearly doubled the performance of the Cato Socket without requiring any hardware changes. This was only possible because Cato runs the compute-intensive operations that normally degrade edge appliance performance, in the Cato Single Pass Processing Engine (SPACE) running across Cato PoPs. By improving SPACE, all edges connected to the Cato SASE Cloud gain increased throughput. Replacement of the Cato Socket is not required. By contrast, SASE solutions implemented as virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud or modified web proxies remain limited to under 1Gbps of throughput for a single tunnel. This limitation forces enterprises to have their edge appliance create and manage multiple tunnels and load-balance their traffic between them. Cato is also delivering 5Gbps connections to other cloud providers. The new Cato cross-connect will enable private, high-speed layer-2 connections between Cato and any other cloud provider connecting to the Equinix Cloud Exchange (ECX) or Digital Reality. The Cato cross-connect meets the need for multicloud and hybrid cloud deployments that demand reliable, high-throughput connections. It also enables channel partners to deliver Cato SSE 360 into legacy deployments by establishing a network-to-network interface (NNI) into the Cato SASE Cloud.

Scality has announced today that Somerville has selected it to scale its data storage services in order to meet growing customer demand.   The solution combines a petabyte-scale stretched RING object storage architecture across three sites in Sydney and Melbourne. It runs on HPE Apollo 4000 data storage servers from Hewlett Packard Enterprise with immutable data protection, utilising Veeam backup software over an S3 API. This solution is delivered through the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform to provide Somerville scalable performance with pay-per-use flexibility.Craig Somerville, CEO and Founder, Somerville IT Services, says, “For every MSP holding data on behalf of customers, and even the CIO of an enterprise organisation whose responsibility is to ensure that they protect the organisation’s data, Scality’s immutability features and resilience features are absolutely critical.”Since the initial deployment, Somerville has increased capacity. Scality’s object storage extends Veeam’s enterprise-grade capabilities and helps manage data with reduced cybersecurity risks and lower costs. Craig says, "We have one engineer who manages the platform day-to-day. He spends more time on improvements and developing the platform than the time the entire team used to spend just keeping the lights on. It’s completely changed the way we manage the data protection practice.” The HPE GreenLake deployment provides cost-savings, flexibility, and less hassle for the Somerville team. Scality continues to see adoption across all sectors including service providers, financial services, government, healthcare, life sciences and more.Wally MacDermid, Vice President of Strategic Alliances, Scality says, "We are excited to see what Somerville has accomplished for their clients and their own IT service offerings. They are a trusted source for bringing Australian customers into the modern era with a sovereign solution that keeps data protected. The continued growth rates around the world with both, Veeam and HPE GreenLake, keep us focused on our mission to provide customers with ultimate cyber resiliency and unbreakable data protection.”

Spirent brings the network edge into view with its new solution

Spirent Communications has announced the availability of its new over-the-air (OTA) performance-monitoring solution, designed to bring the network edge into the complete end-to-end test and monitoring landscape. The Spirent Mobile Test Platform (MTP) is a small form factor solution, that provides edge service monitoring and remote management. Supporting this handheld device and four SIMs in one functional box, the platform features a patent-pending management technology that enables unprecedented remote monitoring of the customer experience, whatever the chosen location. It also provides operators with central control of test devices at the edge, including software updates and device hardware reboots. “The ability to effectively test and monitor network performance end-to-end must fully embrace the edge,” says Spirent’s Charles Thompson, VP of Product Management. “Assurance solutions need to keep up with increasingly stringent thresholds to ensure performance and quality of experience at the edge during pre-deployment, verification, and ongoing service management. This is why we have developed the MTP.” The MTP enables systematic performance monitoring and ad hoc testing from the edge of the network that can be consumed and integrated for deeper network analytics at a larger scale and provide unrivalled network visibility and analysis. By combining the existing fixed and mobile network assurance solutions with the OTA capability of MTP, customers can now deploy and assure new 5G services to detect and isolate faults in the network.

By David Trossell, CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks Latency and packet loss are highly disruptive to Wide Area Networks (WANs), and in the fight to mitigate their effects, managements costs can spiral out of control. To combat this, organisations and enterprises need to find a solution that tackles them both head on. In fact, Ken Wood, Principal Technical Product Manager at Teradata, writes about ‘Taking the management costs out of network latency’ for TechRadar Pro. He concludes, “The powerful combination of the right technology is perfect for on-premises, private, hybrid, public and multi-cloud solutions, where long network latency might keep an enterprise from fully leveraging access to their sensitive data. The cost savings and deduced management overhead spent on curating important data could also play a role in architecting data access methodologies.” The cost of WAN latency to management is in both time and risk. Time to get data to where it is most needed, time to protect data, time for employees and customers waiting for that data. There is therefore a need for latency mitigation techniques over large latencies, and over intercontinental distances because the further away data centres are from each other, the higher the risk of data and WAN speeds being impacted by latency and packet loss. Performance is critical Steven Umbehocker, CEO/CTO, OSNEXUS Corporation, comments regarding metro clusters, “Recovery time objectives are critical to most organisations, so that’s imperative to allow enough performance to keep up with the data ingest rate at a primary site. The other key thing with metro clusters is that they are an increasingly in-demand architecture, where the storage is distributed across multiple sites to achieve zero downtime. That’s only possible when the latency is low enough to provide sufficient and adequate performance for the workloads. PORTrockIT solves these latency issues so that metro clusters can be deployed across a much larger geographic area.” “If you have an earthquake in one zone, that larger metro cluster has benefits. You can avoid downtime, enabling organisations to link their disparate sites together. There is a great deal of latency between New York and Tokyo, so you need something like PORTrockIT to mitigate latency.” To ensure mitigation, there is a balancing act of speed against utilising strong encryption, over-protecting critical and sensitive data. Should the worst happen, there will also be a need to recover data from an air-gapped recovery source. Air gaps are created when data is stored offsite, without any connectivity, so that if an organisation or an enterprise is attacked, both sensitive data and systems can be quickly restored. The data can be used to restore systems that have been adversely affected via a WAN. Data lineages So why are data lineages important? The term data lineage means different things to different industry segments. For some, it is maybe transient data that only has a lifetime of a day before it is amalgamated into other data structures and, so, the original data is deleted. Yet, on the other hand, only one copy can exist and this is immutable – but is needed to be accessed across continents. There are others that are immutable, but this is governed by law to be accessible years later. Every data has its own lifecycle, which organisations need to be able to manage efficiently and effectively for the benefit of their operations. Latency and its friend packet loss are the killers of performance over the WAN. It can turn a 10Gb WAN into what appears to now be more than a 500mb WAN performance. For many companies that rely on moving large data sets around the globe is a major issue – it comes back to that question: ‘How much is latency costing you in time and resources? There also needs to be a consideration of where to locate disaster recovery sites to ensure they aren’t placed within the same circles of disruption. Organisations and enterprises all keep daily backups in their data centres just in case of a mistaken deleted file. They also keep a full disaster recovery backup in their data centre to protect them against any downtime that may be caused by a natural or manmade disaster, such as a cyber attack. The most important backup is the offsite, air-gapped backup that is held as far away as possible. The problem with having that crucial air gap a long distance away is WAN latency. Some organisations and enterprises use a tape storage company, such as Iron Mountain, to give that critical distance and air gap. However, that ‘offsite storage’ has its own ‘latency’ i.e., time to find the tapes and the speed of delivery van, when trying to recover data. So, the right WAN technology that mitigates WAN latency and packet loss can add value within the whole data movement, protection, lineage, and remote computation roles. Determining the ‘right technology’ To determine the ‘right technology for mitigating the effects of latency and packet loss, with a view to increasing bandwidth utilisation, has often been a complex task. There have been many technologies employed to try and improve the performance of transporting data over WAN. The industry has tried compression and deduplication with WAN Optimisation, but this has a performance limit well below modern Gigabit WANs. This has been vexing the industry for many years. The key question is about how to make TCP/IP work over long distances. There have been a number of solutions that use UDP as the transport and have mechanisms to cope with lost packets, etc. However, these suffer when using the higher Gigabit network of more than 10GB, which are now becoming the norm. A different approach is required. That is one that can be used the trusted TCP/IP protocol, mitigate packet loss, scale to more than 40Gb and mitigate the effects of latency – even over-continental and intercontinental distances. This technology is called WAN Acceleration. WAN Acceleration: A different approach WAN Acceleration takes a completely different approach to the problem. It uses standard TCP protocol. Rather than compressing or deduplicating data, or using UDP, it uses a mixture of parallelisation of the incoming TCP stream, managing the flow of data on and off the WAN. This is coupled with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to manage every aspect of the flow of data across the WAN. There is no need for deduplication or compression; the data is not touched nor modified. This approach can accelerate encrypted data without the need of keys. This means there are no new storage requirements, low compute and memory requirements, while driving up WAN utilisation to 90%. Steven adds, “You don’t want to have to wait around for data to be copied; you want it to be continuous. You are continuously copying data between sites. This is versus strategies that are doing periodic copies. WAN Acceleration enables organisations to get increased value and performance out of a 10 gig WAN, with up to a 700% boost in throughput. Customers will tell us what WAN link they have, and we look at whether creating metro clusters are possible. With PORTrockIT, they can do more to achieve this.” Daily backups WAN Acceleration negates the need to store and back up data locally, reducing both network and management costs. With the ability to move data at high-speed using WAN acceleration, organisations and enterprises can backup data to be stored offsite daily, or more if required. AI and machine learning (ML) are used in WAN Acceleration to reduce the need to manually manage the data transfers over the WAN. The AI will automatically tune the network parameters it uses, as it transfers data. This always ensures maximum efficiency. More to the point, one of the key advantages over WAN Optimisation is the lack of storage required. This means it is simple to create two instances anywhere in the world and start to transfer data to the private, public or hybrid cloud. Reducing management costs So, here are David’s top five tips for taking the management costs out of WAN latency: Remove the technologies that require large amounts of storage, memory and compute requirements Reduce WAN administration costs the AI will manage all aspects of the transmission Maximise the utilisation of the WAN bandwidth Enable simple cloud storage migration All of this can be achieved with WAN Acceleration. To avoid downtime, and to achieve compliance with data protection regulations and laws, such as the European Union’s GDPR, organisations and enterprises can use this technology to store data thousands of miles away with the ability to transmit and receive data at speed. The cost of storing data, be it on-premise, cloud and hybrid cloud once all the costs – including storage space, ingress, egress, capital costs and location - have been taken into account is pretty much the same. However, with some classifications of data, it is where you store data or where it resides that is more important with respect to GDPR data. Whilst it is possible to accept European citizens’ data outside of the EU – such as a USA website order, PID data must be stored within the EU. Moving this data between countries and continents has time and protection pressures. WAN acceleration can speed up encrypted data and, so, it is a simple but fast solution that can save management time and money while reducing operational risk.

Aryaka Releases 6th Annual State of the WAN Report

Aryaka has published its Sixth Annual 2021 State of the WAN Report, the industry’s foremost compendium of insights into global SD-WAN and SASE planning.  1,600 information technology (IT) enterprise decision makers across global enterprises answered the survey, the largest response to the survey since its inception. Key trends identified in this year’s report include: A quarter of the respondents state they have closed 25-50% of their office sites, dovetailing into overall hybrid work initiatives where 75% state that at least a quarter of their employees will remain remote permanently post-pandemic.Accelerating digital transformation initiatives also impact legacy data centers, with 51% planning to eliminate their use within the next 24 months as they move to the cloud.The surveyed group says Microsoft Teams (58%) and Office 365 (55%) are among the most widely adopted SaaS applications, followed by Zoom and Google Docs (35%). A quarter of respondents expect budgets to grow by 25% or more in the next year, with a full three-quarters projecting at least a 10% growth. Investment appears to be accompanied via cost savings.A move to simplify, adopting a more cloud-centric and agile approach, is driving convergence. In the context of network and security, trends include the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), with 64% deploying or planning to deploy over the next year. Over two-thirds will opt for a managed SASE to help address complexity and costs, but challenges include complexity at 40%, a single or dual-vendor approach at 39%, and developing a phased migration strategy at 33%. Observability and control should help with deployments, identified by over two-thirds as a top imperative. "This year’s Aryaka State of the WAN includes many valuable insights backing up trends we see in the industry. These include the effects of hybrid work, with 75% projecting a quarter of their employees to remain at least part-time remote, and cloud connectivity demands skyrocketing with 51% planning to move away from traditional data centres over the next two years. Both initiatives will require more sophisticated network-as-a-service (NaaS) solutions with integrated security offerings,” says Scott Raynovich founder and chief analyst of Futuriom. “The sixth edition of the Global State of the WAN (SOTW) is one of the largest such surveys in the world,” comments Shashi Kiran, CMO of Aryaka. “It packages an enormous number of insights from decisions makers from all over the world, drawn from CIOs, CISOs as well as network, security and cloud practitioners. The 2022 edition reveals new enterprise trends on workplaces, cloud adoption, convergence and several other areas putting a spotlight on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the process. We hope this resource serves as a handy companion for enterprise architects engaged in planning their WAN, security and cloud infrastructure for years ahead.” Year-on-Year Trends and Shifting Priorities In Aryaka’s 2021 State of the WAN Report, 21% indicated that half of their workforce would be working remote post-pandemic. This year that number increased by 11%, with 32% reporting that at least half of their workforce would be permanently remote.  Collaboration and Productivity suites have gained traction. The Microsoft suite has gained momentum, with Teams identified by respondents as the most deployed application, growing its footprint by over half, from 34% in 2021 to 58% this year. Conversely, Google Docs dropped from 41% last year to 35% today with Microsoft 365 now at 55%. For China, basic connectivity concerns dropped noticeably from the last report, at 45% in 2021 to 30% today. In contrast, compliance and regulatory issues are now in the lead at 50%. A renewed interest in ROI was reflected in this year’s report, with 36% of those responding having cost concerns, an increase of 16% vs last year. Though budgets are expected to increase by 25%, both for networking and security, the focus on ROI implies that these increases must be spent judiciously.  IT professionals were less concerned vs previous years about the newness of the technology (28% vs 31% in 2021), and whether applications will perform properly (29% vs 36% in 2021), speaking to a greater confidence in application support. As change management takes priority, there is an increased focus on observability and control, increasing by 9% (69% vs 60% last year). Aryaka 6th Annual State of the WAN 2022 – Four Themes Acceleration of Remote and Hybrid Work: The report looks at challenges in supporting the hybrid workforce, hybrid work trends, and investments planned to support this new environment. 75% state that at least a quarter of their employees will remain hybrid post-pandemic, aligned with the closure of physical facilities, with a quarter stating they have closed 25-50% of their office sites. Effectively managing worker movement between on-premises and remote requires dynamic bandwidth reallocation, identified by 61% as very important. Application Performance and Consumption: In addition, the report dives into the diversity of applications in use and resulting challenges, how enterprises plan to address these, and potential concerns. As noted earlier, collaboration and productivity applications like Microsoft Teams and Office 365 experienced some of the strongest growth, but there was an overall uptick in SaaS application adoption including Zoom (35%), Salesforce (28%), and SAP/HANA (25%). Performance still must improve, with 42% identifying slow performance for remote and mobile users a key issue, followed by 37% calling out slow performance at the branch. Managing Complexity and Managed Services Adoption: The report addresses what managed services enterprises expect, including SD-WAN and SASE implementation plans and budgets, as well as perceived barriers to adoption. This section also looks at MPLS migration. In evaluating managed services, enterprises continue to demand more from their providers, and are looking for a wider set of offers, an all-in-one SD-WAN and SASE that includes the WAN (45%), security (67%), application optimization (40%), last mile management (29%), and multi-cloud connectivity (27%). The movement to SD-WAN SASE also follows the movement away from MPLS, with 46% planning to terminate some or all contracts over the next year. Enterprises are generally bullish on their budgets, with a quarter expecting it to grow by 25% or more, and a total of three quarters expecting at least 10% growth. Networking and Security Convergence Including a SASE Architecture: SASE represents a promise of a converged Cloud-First architecture, but there are concerns on complexity and adoption. 42% state that lackluster application performance is a time sink, and 34% consider security to be a major priority. This path to SASE adoption includes setting a strategy (35%), phasing out of legacy VPNs (32%), as well as consolidating cloud security with zero-trust (29%). Top desired capabilities include a SWG (47%), SD-WAN (36%), and FWaaS (28%). Implementation concerns identified earlier are balanced by expected advantages that include time and cost reduction (37%), as well as agility (33%), while decision-making is still mostly distributed across networking and security, 41% state it is now consolidated. Finally, over two-thirds plan to consume SASE as a managed offer. Study Methodology  TheSixth Annual Global Aryaka 2022 State of the WAN study surveyed over 1600 enterprise decision makers and practitioners including CIOs, CTOs, as well as IT, network, and security managers. Respondents were based in the Americas, EMEA, and APAC, with their companies representing every vertical, led by technology, software, manufacturing, financial, and retail. The survey asked respondents about their networking and performance challenges, priorities, and their plans for 2022 and beyond.   Download the report Download Aryaka’s 6th Annual State of the WAN report here.