Aryaka Releases State of Global Enterprise WAN 2014 Report

MILPITAS, CA--(Marketwired - Feb 19, 2014) - Aryaka®, the leading provider of cloud-based WAN optimization, network acceleration and application acceleration services, today released its inaugural State of the Global Enterprise WAN report. The report is based on aggregate data collected from Aryaka's globally distributed points of presence (POPs), a worldwide private network, and centralized Wide Area Network (WAN) and application-layer visibility.

Anonymous data in aggregate was collected from hundreds of customer sites worldwide, with the focus being on "enterprise access sites," such as branch offices, overseas supplier sites, manufacturing centers and product development and testing sites. Data from exceptionally high-bandwidth sites, such as cloud data centers and the headquarters of major multinational corporations, were removed in order to provide a more accurate picture of the distributed global enterprise WAN.

Highlights from Aryaka's State of the Global Enterprise WAN 2014 report:

Cloud adoption on the rise -- nearing mission-critical tipping point

Aryaka's data show that cloud adoption is on the rise globally.

When we looked at enterprise WAN traffic traveling over the Aryaka network in 2013, one type of traffic clearly dominated: HTTP and HTTPS. What this indicates is that applications are continuing to transition away from monolithic, on-premises applications to web-based consumption and delivery models.

96 percent of our enterprise customers send HTTP traffic over the WAN. For those 96 percent of companies sending HTTP traffic, an average of 24 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 40 percent or more of their WAN traffic is HTTP-related.

Accelerated cloud access an emerging trend

While a broad swath of our enterprise customer base is adopting cloud services, a noticeable segment of those enterprises are interested in accelerated network access to cloud services. More than 11 percent of our customers are now accelerating access to cloud services via Aryaka.

It's important to note that this 11 percent metric is specifically for accelerated access, which almost certainly under-represents the importance of cloud computing to today's global enterprise. Plenty of cloud traffic was likely not measured if simply routed directly to the Internet from their locations. However, the noticeable percentage of customers actively accelerating cloud access indicates that cloud applications and service are nearing a mission-critical tipping point.

More importantly, of those companies accelerating cloud traffic, nearly 47 percent of all traffic from these companies ends up being accelerated cloud-related traffic, implying that their investment in cloud services is serious and permanent.

Last-mile bandwidth improving worldwide

Aryaka's data show that worldwide last-mile Internet access isn't as bad as many believe. We collected anonymized data from the Aryaka customer base, which spans multiple continents, diverse industries, and enterprise sizes, ranging from $2 million to $95 billion in revenues. The data show that last-mile bandwidth rates for these access sites are actually better than the typical 1.5-6 Mbps MPLS connection sizes everyone has come to expect.

In fact, overall, 61 percent of sites have last-mile WAN links in the 5-20 Mbps range. North American and EMEA sites have the highest percentage of high-speed links, while India and China have the highest percentage of sites with links greater than 5 Mbps.

Globally, high speed plus very high-speed connections account for 41 percent of all access links connecting to the Aryaka network. Sites with 11-40 Mbps are fairly consistent worldwide, accounting for roughly a quarter to a third of all sites, no matter which region you look at.

Part of what this signals, we believe, is the fact that the typical enterprise, even in the mid-market, is continuing to broaden its global footprint. That may mean they are opening branch, sales, or engineering offices overseas, or it could signal a growing reliance on contractors and other forms of outsourcing.

As the enterprise becomes more globally distributed, however, improving last-mile bandwidth will likely not keep up with end-user demand. Moreover, enough packet-loss issues plague enough regions that unaided business-class Internet will not be suitable for many mission-critical applications, especially those accessed from a distance.

Worldwide unaided Internet traffic isn't bad, but it isn't business-class

Even if unaided last-mile bandwidth is improving, the Internet experience of many locations worldwide is far from enterprise-class. (We include the qualifier "unaided," since this is not what our end users actually experience, due to Aryaka's multi-segment architecture, which bakes in a number of optimization and compression mechanisms. Our testing was conducted in a way that measured the effect of unaided last-mile links for comparison purposes).

As would be expected Internet Service Providers (ISPs) continue to improve their networks and as technology costs continue to drop, unaided enterprise Internet access link quality is becoming fairly acceptable worldwide. However, packet loss and various congestion issues continue to show up disproportionately in APAC. Even North America and EMEA aren't immune to some packet-loss and congestion issues.

About 74 percent of the sites in the overall set experienced minor network performance issues. This is what most business Internet last-mile links are expected to deliver. In China, the network issues are much more, with 32 percent of sites being fairly unusable for enterprises unless optimized by a solution like Aryaka. Comparatively, EMEA only had 2 percent of sites with major issues.

Other findings in the report include:

• Data on application usage worldwide
• Metrics on data compressibility and bandwidth savings per application type
• The continued importance of certain Microsoft-based application protocols
• How network issues undermine application performance
• A look at accelerating bandwidth demands

About Aryaka

Aryaka delivers application and network performance for the globally distributed enterprise for better collaboration, communication and business productivity. Aryaka eliminates the need for costly WAN appliances or long-haul private links. Aryaka's premier WAN Optimization as-a-Service accelerates any application to any location on one affordable, optimized network. Aryaka's Network as-a-Service provides organizations an optimized network with QoS for instant and reliable business connectivity. Aryaka's Cloud Network as-a-Service provides organizations an optimized and fully meshed network to on premise locations as well as cloud services. Aryaka's Application Delivery as-a-Service enables distributed business users to quickly access centralized enterprise web or IP-based dynamic applications and Cloud resources from anywhere in the world. All services provide end-to-end visibility with 24×7 world-class support. To learn more, visit www.aryaka.com. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Aryaka is a trademark of Aryaka Networks, Inc. All other brands, products or service names are or may be trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.