SD-WAN service provider specialist Teridion says it's now offering enterprise connectivity in mainland China, enabling companies to extend their international networks to locations in the world's second-largest economic territory.

Teridion, which manages a global network of PoPs (points of presence) from which it delivers public cloud-based SD-WAN services, has launched Teridion for Enterprise in China, boasting (importantly) that the service is "compliant" with Chinese regulations. It has PoPs in China, has a partnership with Chinese public cloud giant Alibaba, and says it has achieved compliance with China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and Cross-border Data Telecommunications Industry Alliance (CDTIA) regulations for its SD-WAN service.

That's a critical selling point for Teridion: Following the introduction of IP-Sec VPN regulations in 2017, enterprises with sites in mainland China are required to either access IP-Sec VPNs via a MIIT-authorized carrier (China Mobile, China Telecom or China Unicom) or use expensive MPLS connections that are often bandwidth-constrained. According to Pejman Roshan, VP of Products and Marketing at Teridion, MPLS connectivity in China can cost up to $20,000 per month for speeds of about 10-20 Mbit/s: Teridion claims it can provide 50x or 5,000% performance improvement over such services.

From a technology perspective, Teridion says its service works with SD-WAN and network security systems from vendors such as Cisco Meraki, Fortinet, VMware's VeloCloud, Silver Peak, Citrix and Palo Alto, as well as being able to connect to legacy branch office routers and firewalls. It sells to enterprises through channel partners and managed service providers.

Ted Chamberlin, VP, analyst of CSP Cloud Service Providers at Gartner, says Teridion's new offering could be "a big deal [for enterprises] with significant supply chains in China" and notes that Teridion provides its services at competitive pricing "conducive to a mid-market company that wants to move off ISP or cable."

In addition, he says Teridion provides an attractive service package to mid-market and large enterprises aiming to reduce their reliance on MPLS: Teridion's Roshan says his company's service starts at $1,800 per month per site for bandwidth speeds up to 1 Gbit/s.

"For a lot of enterprises, you start talking about cloud-based Internet and they think it's too unpredictable and not secure -- you can scare away a lot of companies that aren't cloud-native," says Chamberlin. "Teridion does a good job in talking about partnering with Silver Peak, Meraki and Citrix and sprinkles in some cloud companies. They give enterprises a little bit of that comfy feeling that if they have GDPR compliance requirements, for example, their services [handle] that."

Teridion addresses WAN, SaaS application and cloud platform issues with what it calls "curated routing," a capability based on performance-based route optimization (which Gartner calls "telemetry-based routing") that Teridion believes gives it a competitive advantage.

Teridion claims customers with sites in mainland China hooking up to the Teridion for Enterprise service will experience improved throughput to private workloads hosted by any cloud provider globally, lower latency and jitter for video and voice applications, and on-demand bandwidth of up to 1 Git/s. Teridion claims its service can be configured within minutes and deployed in fewer than 24 hours via an IP-SEC connection from the customer's on-site CPE (customer premises equipment) to Teridion's PoPs in China.

Many of Teridion's customers are midsized, distributed enterprises with 500 to 5,000 employees and 20-150 locations in verticals such as manufacturing, financial services and healthcare.

— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading