Aryaka is adding a global on-ramp to the Alibaba Cloud to extend the reach of its SD-WAN and network connectivity services for China-based and international enterprise customers.

Aryaka says the new partnership supports its multi-cloud strategy: The SD-WAN provider runs its own private network and also partners with other major public cloud providers including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle.

Alibaba Cloud will deliver the Aryaka SmartServices portfolio to customers, which can be accessed in the Alibaba Cloud International Marketplace. Netbank, channel partner for Alibaba Cloud and Aryaka, will provide the Aryaka SmartServices in China. Aryaka's SmartServices platform includes managed connectivity, application and WAN optimization, security, multi-cloud networking, global orchestration and provisioning, and business analytics.

Shashi Kiran, chief marketing and product officer for Aryaka, says Alibaba's customers approached Aryaka about the need for a partnership between the companies to expand SD-WAN availability and access to public clouds in the APAC region. Customers with offices in Australia, Singapore and China, for example, were also seeking an alternative to MPLS for connectivity outside of those regions and improved access to cloud applications, says Kiran.

Figure 1: Shashi Kiran is chief marketing and product officer for Aryaka.
(Image courtesy of Aryaka.)

"In this partnership, Alibaba will take Aryaka's solution to their customers, and we'll both come together in a way that allows for very predictable application performance delivery and global site connectivity for their customers as well as ours that want to access Alibaba public cloud services," says Kiran. "They're the largest public cloud provider in Asia Pacific and China."

Alibaba Cloud has the largest share of the global Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market in the Asia Pacific region as of 2019, and has 63 availability zones in 21 regions, according to Gartner. In addition, Alibaba Cloud's IaaS market share in APAC rose to 28.2% in 2019 from 26.1% in 2018.

In light of social distancing restrictions stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, many enterprises are seeking out secure remote access options at an accelerated pace. In addition, enterprise customers want to reduce latency for employees accessing cloud-based applications as they work from home, and are increasingly deploying SD-WAN as a managed service to simplify utilization of the service across multiple regions.

"The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of more cloud-based technology," says Kiran. "Customers want the predictability of something like MPLS but also the agility and cloud-native or cloud-first capabilities that the modern wide-area network brings."

— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading