When it comes to networking in the cloud, IT organizations are usually left with two choices. Rely on an Internet that is shared by everybody in the world or lease an MPLS network from a telecommunications carrier at an exorbitant rate.
Aryaka, a provider of wide area network (WAN) optimization services delivered via the cloud, wants to give IT organizations a third option by opening its global network to provide cloud applications and services.
Sonal Puri, vice president of marketing and sales for Aryaka, says that the company has built out a global network of 25 data centers to support its WAN optimization service, so by opening its network to providers of cloud applications, organizations get instant access to a private network at a fraction of the cost of leasing MPLS lines from a carrier.
Cloud network as a service is designed to allow organizations to move applications to the Aryaka data center that is best located to deliver that service with the lowest latency, while still taking advantage of WAN optimization when necessary. In contrast, Puri says other cloud service providers often want to deploy an application in a single data center, which makes it easier for them to centrally manage regardless of application performance concerns. In contrast, Puri says that the Aryaka environment is better suited for cloud applications that are by definition highly distributed.
Given the fact that the laws of physics have not been suspended in the cloud, the single biggest challenge that organizations will encounter when it comes to cloud computing is network latency. That challenge can be solved in multiple ways, but the most efficient is to reduce the physical distance between where the application resides and the people actually trying to invoke it.