State of The WAN Report 2017: Do Not Reproduce Without Prior Permission

State of the WAN Report
2017
www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

Do not reproduce without prior permission.
STATE OF THE WAN | 1
Contents
State of the WAN Report 2017..................................................................02

Executive Summary 02
Key Insights from the State of the WAN 03
The State of the WAN in 2017 04
Enterprise WAN Traffic 04
By Geography 04
By Vertical 05
Traffic Trends To Watch 09
The Need for Speed: Bandwidth Trends...................................................12

By Geography 13
By Vertical 18
The Middle Mile Challenge: Application Response Times on the Public Internet 20
Americas 23
EMEA 25
APAC 29
Summary and Conclusions.......................................................................33

Solutions for WAN Challenges 34
Methodology and Demographics.............................................................35

Executive Summary
The Internet Is Not Your Enterprise WAN

Globally, WAN traffic is growing over 200% year over year. The demand for high-speed connec-
This data was aggregated
tivity over long distances is increasing as enterprises globalize, and data using HTTP and HTTPS
– the protocols that support cloud/SaaS applications – now accounts for 50% of that traffic. from over
Aryaka has collected data from over 5000 locations in 63 countries to measure the performance
of file transfers and cloud/SaaS applications over the public Internet. These findings have in-
dicated that Internet bandwidths and quality are increasing at the WAN edge and over short
distances. However, the hand-off between ISPs over the Internet or IP-VPN is getting worse,
affecting the performance of business-critical applications, such as ERP or hosted voice and
5000
video. For data and applications being transferred over long distances, the middle mile remains Locations
unreliable and is riddled with latency, packet loss, and jitter.
To solve for the resulting poor application performance globally, especially now that the “shift”
to cloud and SaaS environments appears to be non-negotiable, enterprises are heavily investing
in larger WAN links at the edge. But does that truly solve for the unreliability of the middle mile?
In this report, we anonymized, aggregated, and analyzed WAN traffic to identify trends and
challenges in connectivity over the public Internet, as it relates to application performance, WAN
63
reliability, and bandwidth access between specific geographies and different industry verticals.
The data included in this report is essential in gauging the usefulness of a large number of WAN
technologies. We drill down into particular industries and regions to provide commentary on
Countries
relevant trends in the data, while also zooming out to provide an end-to-end perspective on the
state of the global enterprise WAN.
Using this data, WAN managers and IT leaders can understand the risks associated with their
WAN deployments on end user experience and business execution, and make decisions that
position IT as a true business partner to the enterprise.

Key Findings from the State of the WAN
1. The volume of enterprise traffic has grown across all regions and
verticals.
Data is exploding worldwide, driven by Big Data, the Internet of Things (IoT),
and video; the proliferation of network-attached and wireless devices; virtu-
alization; and the adoption of both public and private cloud delivery models.
From our data, we find that the largest growth regionally is in Asia-Pacific
(APAC) and across verticals is in the Software and Internet vertical followed by
the Manufacturing industry.
2. Nearly 50% of enterprise traffic is a combination of HTTP and HTTPS.

Applications are continuing to transition away from monolithic, on-premises
HTTPS
applications to web-based consumption and delivery models. We see a size-
+
able drop in the usage of certain on-premises applications, indicating that
HTTP enterprises are replacing these with cloud versions of those applications or
entirely new applications that perform similar functions. The shift to the cloud
is now non-negotiable.
3. Bandwidth at non-headquarters enterprise sites is reasonably good

worldwide.
Globally, only about 12% our customers have links with bandwidth less than
10 Mbps, which is over a 50% decrease from 34% last year. Twenty-five per-
cent of our customers have one or more 100 Mbps links. Even in developing
25% customers - 100Mpbs countries, access-site bandwidth is never below 2 Mbps.
4. While certain components of the enterprise WAN are improving, oth-

ers are actually hindering the enterprise’s ability to conduct business
over the Internet, especially when application traffic must travel over
long distances.
TCP application response times can be as high as 40 seconds and have a varia-
tion of nearly 200% depending on the distance between the sites. As distance
increases, the problem is further accentuated. Our tests revealed that the link
with the highest variability in response time was the link between Singapore
and Dubai.
5. For some regions, inconsistency in the application response time

cannot be solely attributed to the distance between locations, but is
100%
also dependent on the network infrastructure itself.
With some geographies, such as the Middle East and some parts of Asia, the
connectivity in place is more detrimental than distance alone. In some instanc-
es, the variation in response time can be as high as 153%, with an average
0% application response time around one second.

The State of the WAN

in 2017
Enterprise WAN Traffic
Traffic across the enterprise WAN greatly affects the demand for bandwidth. In this section, we’ll examine the vol-
ume of traffic across the enterprise WAN and evaluate the changes in the volume relative to last year. The findings
have been broken down by region and vertical.
By Geography
Demand for bandwidth continues to climb. New devices added to the network, such as smartphones and tablets,
in addition to new computing paradigms like cloud computing, drive the demand for bandwidth higher each year.
Moreover, as more and more organizations conduct their business online, B2B network traffic continues to climb.
Looking at the data, we saw network traffic growing across all regions; however, there were a few important
trends that deviated from the 2015 data:
In Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) and the Americas, it appears that growth is beginning to stabilize,
as compared to last year -- although the network traffic has still grown significantly. The initial fast growth is
perhaps an indication of how these markets were early to adopt cloud technology and invest in their WAN infra-
structure, while the stabilization shows that they are now entering a slower and more normalized growth mode
following those investments.
Enterprise traffic across these regions continues to see a positive trend, however, and shows no signs of slowing
down.
One significant growth trend can be seen in the APAC market. APAC is an emerging market and is fast growing.
As compared to the last year, this year’s bandwidth growth in APAC outpaced all other regions and stands at
nearly 250% growth. In addition, the APAC region was the only region where the network traffic has continued
to display a positive trend relative to last year.

The chart below shows the growth of enterprise WAN traffic by region.
Chart 1: Enterprise Traffic by Region:
While we can see that everyone is clamoring for more bandwidth, there’s a negative and coincident trend we
must mention: most IT budgets are flat or declining.1
Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) unit prices are not likely to decline year over year to keep in line with flat
budgets and growing demands for capacity. In addition, MPLS requires a great investment in other solutions, like
WAN Optimization, in order to make good use of the bandwidth, which increases the budget needed for further
MPLS purchases.
Smarter alternatives to private MPLS are needed to keep up with traffic growth across the new distributed enter-
prise. Simply put, doubling the bandwidth of expensive private WAN services like MPLS every 12-18 months is just
not a solution for the growing bandwidth needs of the modern enterprise.
By Vertical
If we drill down further to determine the variation in network traffic and thereby, bandwidth demand, across
industries and verticals, we see some interesting patterns.
Two new verticals, “Transportation and Logistics” and “Real Estate and Construction,” have entered the top five
verticals by volume of WAN traffic since last year’s report.
1
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3277517

Real Estate and Construction is a new entrant into this study and so we will have to track trends in the coming
years. However, according to a new market research report, it appears that the growth in WAN traffic is primarily
driven by the growing demand for optimizing business processes. The big data trend has fueled the demand for
business process management software in the real estate sector.2
Transportation and Logistics companies are seeking to drive operational efficiencies through the use of IoT and
asset intelligence solutions that help them to make more informed decisions. These companies are linking physical
assets to analytics and control systems through the Internet. These solutions are relatively new for Transportation
and Logistics, which could explain the rapid growth in WAN traffic over the last year.
The Software vertical saw the highest growth in bandwidth demand, with demand almost doubling compared to
last year’s. This trend, however, is identical to last year’s data, wherein the Software vertical beat out all verticals
in bandwidth demand. This is to be expected, as the usefulness of business software relies almost entirely on the
transfer of data.
However, the growth in WAN traffic in the Manufacturing industry is an interesting development. Growth has
jumped from 296% in 2015 to 441% in 2016.
Manufacturers are under constant pressure to increase accuracy and make process-speed their differentiation.
Low Power Wireless Access (LPWA) is beginning to take off and spawn many new IoT applications. Business In-
sider’s premium research service expects the installed base of manufacturing IoT devices to swell from 237 million
in 2015 to 923 million in 2020.3
According to an article in Tech Republic, Manufacturing organizations are making IoT essential in asset tracking,
control room consolidation, predictive maintenance, autonomous robots, augmented reality, and additive manu-
facturing.4 This requires new investments into networks to transmit information through a data pipeline and into
ERP systems and analytics toolsets.
Adequate bandwidth must be maintained to enable the machine-to-machine communications that keep a man-
ufacturing production floor running, by allowing machines to continuously communicate with each other across
broad distances and between multiple manufacturing facilities around the world.
“Network costs are reducing and technologies are improving the latency of net-
works. Traditionally, warehouse management, distribution, scanning/labelling,
and control systems run locally in factories due to network restrictions (band-
width and latency). With networks improving, more companies are likely consoli-
dating these systems to offsite data centers and the cloud, thus generating more
WAN traffic.”
Dustin Collins
VP, Global Infrastructure Services, PSP
2
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/business-process-management-bpm-in-real-estate-market-worth-12980-million-usd-by-2021-600542281
3
http://www.businessinsider.com/internet-of-things-in-manufacturing-2016-10
4
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/dont-underestimate-the-networks-importance-in-manufacturing-analytics-and-iot/

The Financial Services industry has also seen a huge jump in bandwidth demand from 111% in 2015 to 371%
in 2016.
The spike may be due to the increased focus on offering more highly integrated services within the bank, online,
or via mobile app. Banks are enhancing the customer experience at branch locations to provide proactive customer
experience that delivers more information for the customer and tools that meet specific banking needs. This means
an expansion beyond traditional products, services, and channels.
There is also more reliance upon interfaces with back-end disparate third-party systems, IoT, advanced ATM tech-
nology, and FinTech/banking partnerships – creating more sizeable traffic on the network.
Chart 2: Enterprise Traffic by Vertical
There has been a steady increase in WAN traffic across multiple other verticals.

Chart 3: Top Verticals for WAN Traffic
Apart from the verticals we have already talked about in the previous section, “Energy and Utilities” and “Travel,
Recreation, and Leisure” have all grown by around 200%, indicating a positive trend across verticals.
The “Healthcare” sector, however, has been relatively slow in the growth of bandwidth demand. A 2016 Harvard
Business Review study indicates that healthcare as a sector is still lagging behind in adopting digitization in a ho-
listic way.5 According to the study, though Healthcare uses incredibly sophisticated technology in diagnostics and
treatment, substantial parts of their workforce use only rudimentary or no technology. Our data also highlights
this difference between the verticals.
Insights
Understanding these patterns of bandwidth demand across geographies and verticals can shape how WAN technol-
ogy providers invest or market in specific regions/countries or to specific verticals in 2017 and the following years.
• EMEA and the Americas continue to grow in bandwidth use, but at a slower rate than last year. The focus of
bandwidth growth is now centered in APAC.
• Transportation and Logistics and Real Estate and Construction are now in the top five verticals growing in
bandwidth use.
• Software vertical is consistently high in bandwidth use, year-over-year.
• Manufacturing and Financial Services are verticals to watch for future years.
• Healthcare continues to lag in terms of bandwidth use.
5
https://hbr.org/2016/04/a-chart-that-shows-which-industries-are-the-most-digital-and-why

Traffic Trends to Watch
When we looked at enterprise WAN traffic traveling over the Aryaka network in 2017, one type of traffic clearly
dominated: HTTP and HTTPS.
This is one trend that has been consistent between all our reports. This indicates that applications are continuing
to transition away from monolithic, on-premises models to web-based consumption and delivery models. Devel-
opers and researchers have been forecasting this shift,6 and our data backs those predictions up.
Of the total WAN traffic, HTTP and HTTPS together make up close to 50% of the traffic.
In the past, the majority of WAN traffic was of the client-server variety, with traffic moving to and from the data
center. But the advent of cloud and the increased adoption of cloud services have driven up the amount of Inter-
net traffic significantly.
Chart 4: Top TCP-based Applications for WAN traffic
6
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3354117

Chart 5: Top TCP Applications - Global - 2015 vs 2016
In comparing application data between 2015 and 2016, we observed some interesting trends:
The data indicates a decline in TCP-based applications such as FTP, MS Remote Desktop, SMTP, and MSSQL. This
is to be expected when you consider the decline in context with the rise of cloud services.
Specialized file-sharing and applications protocols such as FTP, Remote Desktop, and MSSQL are associated with
enterprise applications that were built in the client-server universe, before the big migration to SaaS and cloud.
Most SaaS applications use HTTP and HTTPS for access, indicating that enterprises are continuing the migration
from legacy enterprise applications to web-based SaaS applications. We expect this trend to continue over time.
Between the HTTP and HTTPS traffic, HTTP traffic has gone down from 22% to 18% whereas HTTPS has grown
from 21.6% to almost 28%. This is most likely because Google announced a move in 2014 toward increasing the
use of HTTPS on its websites, as well as a general trend for websites to encrypt HTTP traffic.
Other sources have confirmed this trend. For example, a research forecast from the Canadian networking equip-
ment company Sandvine reports that “70% of global Internet traffic will be encrypted in 2016, with many net-
works exceeding 80%.”7
For companies running Common Internet File System (CIFS, which is typically used for file access and remote
printing in Microsoft Windows environments), there has been a steep decrease in the volume of CIFS traffic from
24.8% to 16% in 2016.This is a sizeable decrease, and it reveals how organizations are moving away from run-
ning their own file-sharing networks and turning to file sharing in the cloud to facilitate employee access to files
and enable collaboration from anywhere and on any device.
7
https://www.sandvine.com/trends/encryption.html

There are multiple online file sharing services from companies such as Box, Citrix ShareFile, Dropbox, Google, etc.,
and these cloud file services can reduce the costs associated file servers, while also eliminating the management
complexity associated with them. This explains why CIFS traffic has taken a downward trend.
On-premises mail SMTP, which only contributed to 4.7% of WAN Traffic in 2015, has gone down further to 2%
of the total WAN traffic. One big factor contributing to the shift in this traffic is the rise of Microsoft’s Office 365.
Rather than accessing enterprise applications from local servers of private WAN connections, workers are increas-
ingly accessing their applications from the cloud. Just between 2015 and 2016, 91.4% of the companies had
more than 100+ Office 365 users.8
Insights
The trends in WAN traffic year over year give us insight into not only what types of applications are dominat-
ing the WAN, but also what applications – and what type of connectivity – enterprises should be investing
in. Some observations:
• HTTP and HTTPS are the most used applications, with an emphasis on HTTPS, as more and more enter-
prises use it for sending encrypted data.
• The decline of CIFS usage coincides with the rise of cloud computing, specifically, cloud file-sharing ser-
vices.
• On-premises mail SMTP is declining as well, most probably due to the use of Microsoft Office 365.
• SaaS applications will only continue to grow as a part enterprise business investments, requiring net-
works that can provide cloud connectivity for end users globally.
8
https://www.skyhighnetworks.com/cloud-security-blog/7-charts-reveal-the-meteoric-rise-of-office-365/

The Need for Speed: Bandwidth Trends
Application performance for all users – no matter where in the world they are located – is the primary driver of
bandwidth use. The initial use cases for Aryaka’s customers were tackling globalization challenges and accelerat-
ing application traffic to employees, customers, and partners located far away from centralized servers.
Fast forward to today. Enterprises also want to use technology to navigate far more complex use cases, such as
enterprise mobility and accelerating access to their workloads in public, private, and hybrid clouds.
This translates to a steady demand for larger link sizes in order to accommodate the network traffic growth.
Last-mile bandwidth appears to be improving worldwide, to fulfill this need. The data shows that last-mile band-
width rates are actually better than the typical 1.5-6 Mbps MPLS connection sizes most enterprises have come to
expect. However, congestion and other issues that affect the middle mile mean that the actual bandwidth avail-
able for use is often far less than that.
For our analysis of typical WAN link sizes, we excluded data center sites. These are generally high-bandwidth links
between data centers – and that would skew the data. Without the data centers in the mix, we obtain a more ac-
curate view of what is happening at the enterprise level. The sites represented are the remote access sites, such as
branch offices, which are accessing applications located at headquarters and other centralized data center locations.
One trend that pops at us is that there has been a visible shift towards higher bandwidth links, with the highest
amount of growth in the 100 Mbps category.
Chart 6: WAN Links Speeds — Global

Chart 7: Y/Y Comparison of Growth by WAN Link Size
In the chart above, you can see that while in 2015, much of the growth was centered around 10 and 20 Mbps,
in 2016 the bulk of the has growth moved to 100 Mbps. From merely 7% in 2015, 100 Mbps links now make
up about a quarter of the links.
This reflects a constant thirst for larger pipe sizes – and from the way the numbers have rapidly begun trending
upward, it appears that gigabit-speed WAN links may become the norm soon. People are attempting to solve
their network needs by simply adding more bandwidth at the edge locations.
By Geography
This section examines the WAN link sizes broken down by geography to highlight any region-specific differences.
The Americas lead, followed closely by EMEA, both of which have lots of activity on high-speed WAN links.
(We define “high speed” as 10 Mbps or better and “very high speed” as 41-100 Mbps.)

Chart 8: WAN Link Speeds -- Americas
This section examines the WAN link sizes broken down by geography in order to highlight any region-specific
differences.
The Americas lead, followed closely by EMEA, both of which have lots of activity on high-speed WAN links.

Last-mile high-speed link sizes in EMEA lag the global average, as well as the sizes of those in the Americas. How-
ever, EMEA has a higher percentage of very-high-speed links compared to the global average, while it has also
seen the highest amount of growth in the 100 Mbps category (from 7% to 29%).

Compared to last year, APAC has seen a significant increase in high-speed WAN links, with the number almost mirror-
ing the global average percentage at 84%. A full 30% of APAC sites have very-high-speed links of sizes greater than
40 Mbps, up from 15% last year.
Another thing to note in APAC is that the number of low-speed connections (less than 10 Mbps) has gone down
significantly, from 33% to 15%. This indicates a reduction in the disparity of link speeds for global enterprises with
offices in APAC.

A Closer Look at China
While China is included in our overall APAC numbers, we decided to drill down into this country’s data separately, as
well. We believe stand-alone data from this economic behemoth has significance and points to globalization patterns
that could be missed in regional data. China’s own state-controlled carriers are spending billions on network expan-
sion, and the Chinese economy leads the world in economic growth rate.
According to a report from Boston Consulting Group, a study of about 100 Chinese corporations revealed how they
are increasingly buying foreign firms to scale, upgrade technology, and expand in new markets.9 This translates into
more demand for bandwidth, more enterprise WAN traffic, and more investment in WAN infrastructure to support
this growth.
In line with these patterns, the growth in China mirrors that of the APAC region in general, but it has seen an even
higher increase in use of very-high-speed WAN links
9
https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/06/27/going-global-more-chinese-companies-take-the-world-stage/

Use of 100 Mbps links in China grew dramatically in 2016, from 6% of links to 25% of links total. Patterns for China
point to higher growth compared to APAC and closely mirror global average increases in percentage of high-speed
and very-high-speed WAN links.
This shows the power and growth of the Chinese economy overall as it closes the gap with the West in terms of de-
mand for high-speed connectivity.
By Vertical
The chart below highlights the WAN link sizes for six major verticals. Companies in the Financial sector have the
highest demand for very-high-speed WAN links – 63% of them use WAN links with bandwidth above 40 Mbps. This
comes as no surprise as these companies use bandwidth-hungry applications for transactions.
Links for Traffic and Logistics companies are skewed towards medium-to-low speed, typically 10 Mbps or less. This
may be because this industry is still growing in terms of usage needs. We will keep an eye on this vertical in future
years for comparison.
More than 75% of the links in the Healthcare, Software and Internet, Manufacturing, and Business Services sectors
rely on high-speed or very-high-speed WAN links, indicating an almost ubiquitous trend in increase in bandwidth de-
mands across verticals.

Insights
As more and more enterprises come to depend on the high-speed transfer of data, the need for larger WAN link sizes
will also increase. Soon, we will most likely be seeing gigabit WAN link sizes becoming the norm.
• 100 Mbps links are on the rise, jumping from 7% of the global average to 25%.
• The Americas use the largest links, but EMEA is not far behind – and is still above the global average in usage
of very-high-speed links.
• China’s rapid growth is setting this developing nation up to be on par with the developed nations of the
West. We will continue to monitor the trends in WAN link speed as China’s enterprise usage inevitably grows
in the coming years.

The Middle Mile Challenge: Application Response

Times on the Public Internet
As our data indicates, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have continued to improve the quality and scale of
their networks.
Technology acquisition costs continue to drop, and these providers are increasing investments in infrastructure; there-
fore, unaided enterprise Internet access link quality has improved worldwide. However, these access links across long
distances are still not ready for true enterprise-level connectivity or application performance.
There are various reasons for the poor quality of these links when used to communicate with sites further away, in-
cluding packet loss at peering points, reduced throughput with increasing latency caused by distance, and more. The
shift in application usage patterns has increased reliance on the public Internet to reach cloud applications, which has
large implications for network performance.
For this report, Aryaka attempted to measure typical HTTP response time over the public Internet by running
some tests.

Test Methodology
The Aryaka Network Access Point (ANAP) runs wgets (“computer programs that retrieve information from servers”10)
every five minutes between two pairs of Aryaka POP locations, on a separate tunnel established between the ANAPs.
This tunnel uses the public Internet instead of the Aryaka core network. It worked as follows:
• A randomly generated 100KB file is fetched every time.

• The following are the returned statistics:
• HTTP result code
• Connect time (milliseconds)
• Transfer time (milliseconds)
• The values used for the purpose of the analysis are a summation of the transfer and connect times, when the HTTP
result code is non zero.
• Application Response Time = Connect time + Transfer Time
This Application Response Time data has been collected over the last year and is then used as the input to calculate
the following parameters:
Standard Deviation:
This is a measure that is used to quantify the amount of variation or dispersion of a set of data
values. This data was gathered for connection times. For example, in this case, low standard
deviation indicates that the response times tend to be close to the mean of the set, while a high
standard deviation indicates that response times vary greatly
Variation:
The coefficient of variation is a measure of spread that describes the amount of variability
relative to the mean. This is similar to the standard deviation and is useful when the data sets
have different units. Both the standard deviation and the variation were used in the analysis of
connection response times.
Minimum Response Time:

This is the lowest value of the application response time between the two considered locations
over the last year.
Maximum Response Time:

This is the highest value of the application response time between the two considered locations
over the last year.
Average Response Time:

Average application response time between the two considered locations over the last year.
10
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wget

These tests were run on multiple connection segments around the world to analyze the performance and reliability of
a connection in the middle mile.
These individual tests of popular links are useful because the measured response time is indicative of whether the In-
ternet is adequate for enterprise-grade transactions. The measured response time is dependent on the latency of the
link and is factored into the “Connect Time” in the application response time calculation.
Aggregating and collating data from multiple links can be used to put together a composite picture of connections
on the public Internet around the world. For example, we can look at the link between Shanghai and Frankfurt to
illustrate how the data is collected and analyzed.
In the case of the response time measured between the Frankfurt and Shanghai locations, over the last year, the vari-
ation can be as high as 118.60%, indicating that the response times are highly variable. Response time can be as high
as 23 seconds, and the average is around 20 seconds.
Of the pairs of locations between which these tests were performed, the link with the lowest average response time
was Amsterdam – London, where the value was 136 ms. This link also had a variation of around 30%, indicating that
links between locations within a region are relatively stable and usable. These locations are also closest in terms of
distance (amongst our dataset), separated by only 222 miles.

The next sections break down data by multiple geographies to look at the data aggregated from specific links.
Americas
In the Americas, our data reveal relatively higher consistency than in other regions. The San Jose – Chicago link is the
most stable link, with a low response time variation of 8% and an average response time of 202 ms. This suggests
that the Internet is still fairly usable within a region, especially within a region where infrastructure is sound.
The lowest quality link was San Jose – Shanghai, with a very high response time variation of 150% and average re-
sponse time as high as three seconds -- with a maximum response time of around 40 seconds. The Delhi – Chicago
link has pretty low variation, with a response time of about 11%, but the average response time is about 900 ms,
which is very high and will certainly affect the end user experience. This is similar to the response time over the San
Jose – Chennai link.
Overall, the Americas have few variations in the response time. The majority of the links have a response time in the
range of 8 – 20%.


EMEA
The Dubai – London segment has a variation of 181%. The links are located 3400 miles apart, so it makes sense
that they would be subject to variation due to factors like latency, which is affected by distance. Compare that to
the 222 miles between the Amsterdam – London link, where there is a variation of only 30%. This is demonstrated
in the table below.
Findings: EMEA 1
The average response time also increases with the distance. The highest average response is as high as 4 seconds,
which is unacceptable,11 even for business critical applications like Office365, let alone mission-critical applications
like an ERP system.
11
http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/tip/Acceptable-application-response-times-vs-industry-standard

Unreliability in the Middle East
Links between Dubai and all other locations were found to be very unreliable. The variations in response time are, at a
minimum, 96% and the variability was observed to be as high as 261%. The average latency is as high as 2.3 seconds.
There is no obvious correlation between distance and the variation in response time, but it is generally unreliable, with
the Dubai – Singapore link suffering the worst connection over the public Internet. The distance between Dubai and
Dallas is the highest and the variation in response time is about 153%, with the average response time about one
second.
Findings: Middle East

Linking with London and EMEA
Links between London and the rest of the world are of reasonable quality, except the already-noted London – Dubai
link. The Frankfurt – London link has a high response time variation of 70%, despite the distance being only 396 miles.
However, the important thing to note is that the average latency is only approximately 258 ms, which is an acceptable
response time on a link between two locations within the same region
The Frankfurt – Shanghai link has the highest variation of 118% and has the highest average latency of about two
seconds. The Frankfurt – LA link has the highest distance between them (5791 miles), but seems to be relatively stable
with a variation of only 8%. However, the average latency is on the higher side at around 486 ms.

Findings: EMEA 2 (Frankfurt)

APAC (INDIA)
Within APAC (India), even though the standard deviation seems higher, and there is considerable variance, the aver-
age is a reasonable 243 ms. The maximum and minimum response times fluctuate between 210 and 498 ms.
Findings: APAC (INDIA)
The Delhi – Chennai link has the highest variation amongst this subset of links even though the distance between
those two links is lower than the distance between any of the other links in India. Analyzing the APAC – Americas
region, there is no obvious positive trend between variations in the response time and distance.
The India – US leg seems to be more or less identical between different locations with a standard deviation of about
125 ms and an average response time of around 800 ms, which is still very high. The link with the next highest re-
sponse time variation is the Sydney – Bangalore link. We have analyzed the Sydney link separately as well.

Australia
Looking at Australia in APAC, the Sydney – Beijing link had the highest response time variation, with the average la-
tency as high as 2 seconds. The other two links from Australia to America and APAC had an average latency is around
800 ms, with a variation of around 20%.

Challenges in China
Looking at the data for China, we found that links were inconsistent. The response time variations range between
63% and 119%. There is no clear trend between distance and variation, but the overall average response time is as
high as 2 seconds. All links to and from China are highly unreliable. The maximum response time has been anywhere
from 12 to 23 seconds.

Insights
One takeaway from the data overall is that, regardless of distance, the middle-mile public Internet and broadband
connections around the world suffer from inconsistency and unpredictability.
• There is a wide variance in performance, especially involving connections to the Middle East and China. It’s
clear that enterprises seeking mission-critical performance cannot depend on public Internet for many Inter-
national connections.
• Simply using a public Internet connection on the last mile and even the middle mile appears to be good
enough for few locations when they are located in close proximity and have good infrastructure.
• In most cases, un-optimized last-mile connectivity, in combination with the public Internet, is a source of
application performance problems, requiring system solutions to address the issue in order for enterprises to
reliably take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing.

Summary and Conclusions
In looking at the State of the WAN, it is clear that a number of trends have created a demand on the enterprise WAN.
For example, we can look to some of the following as trends affecting WAN traffic:
• The rising adoption of cloud services

• Data center consolidation
• Globalization
• Increased data volume
• Outsourcing
• Bring Your Own Device
As a result, WAN traffic is on the rise, regardless of region or vertical.
Given the continuously growing demand for higher bandwidth and predictable connectivity to applications, which are
often located at a distance, WAN managers face a pressing need for flexible network services. However, traditional
private, enterprise-grade networking services, such as MPLS, can no longer satisfy that need in a cost-effective and
scalable manner, due to the high price of hardware and the demands it creates on time and other resources in terms
of deployment and maintenance. In addition, MPLS is a point-to-point networking technology that does not solve the
challenge of connecting to public cloud data centers.
We also observed that the traditional way to handle this rising bandwidth demand was simply to add more capacity. And
the truth is that, while unaided Internet last-mile links may not be predictably reliable worldwide all of the time, they have
improved substantially over the last decade. We observed how the majority of enterprises now have high bandwidth
WAN links, even in the developing economies. However, many of these links will still have problems delivering the con-
sistent application performance business users expect and require, especially across a global WAN footprint.
We briefly studied how the application data had evolved over the years, following the huge shift to the cloud. We
then examined the inconsistencies of the public Internet, specifically, its effect on typical application response time.
Whatever the cause, when you combine middle-mile issues with last-mile problems, enterprise end users will suffer
and productivity will drop, which ultimately results in loss of revenue. As more and more applications are moved to
private or hybrid cloud instances at a distance from global users, performance problems will increase.
Clearly, enterprises need to start planning for new application delivery and consumption patterns. Otherwise, they will
fail to keep up with the desires of CXOs for greater leverage from cloud computing and better business management
from IT. They will also be unable to cope with ever-increasing end-user demand for better performance and faster
response times, whether those end users are employees, customers, partners, contractors, or anyone else granted
access to centralized web or on-premises applications.
Therefore, enterprises try to counter these issues by opting for more advanced WAN topologies with higher budgets,
solutions that include optimizing traffic through compression, WAN Optimization, and other techniques. However,
when done only at customer end-points, these optimization solutions have limits in how much they can address per-
formance over the WAN. And that’s not counting the time required, the complexity, and the CapEx and OpEx costs of
the hardware and software (and IT expertise) needed at each site.

Solutions for WAN Challenges
To solve for the challenges discussed above, WAN managers and IT decision makers should look for modern WAN
solutions that:
• Are delivered as a service

• Contain built-in WAN Optimization
• Leverage points of presence located strategically close to business locations globally
• Connect through a dedicated, private, and redundant core network
• Can be deployed in days not weeks
• Scale as needed
• Are fully-managed
Only a platform with the above features can eliminate the middle-mile loss, significantly reduce last-mile loss, and
mitigate the performance impact of any other last-mile loss that does occur.
A regional SD-WAN solution saves the enterprise on costs and reduces complexity at the branch. However, it does
not address global application performance challenges. Regional solutions are still subject to middle-mile latency and
packet loss, reducing the effectiveness of employing such a solution in the first place.
A global SD-WAN, such as Aryaka SmartCONNECT, can replace MPLS and provide application performance
improvements globally. In addition to cost savings, a global SD-WAN grants the IT team increased agility and
reduced complexity.
The move toward more flexible, cloud-based SD-WANs, including networks-as-a-service, is happening now and is
likely to accelerate over time. The use cases include MPLS replacement, WAN Optimization, virtual customer premises
equipment, and application performance improvements for cloud applications.
HQ/DC BRANCH OFFICE
Global SD-WAN
BRANCH OFFICE MOBILE USERS

Methodology
To gauge the state of the enterprise WAN, Aryaka gathered anonymous, aggregated metrics from our own
customer base.
Aryaka’s global SD-WAN solution comprises a private backbone built across 28 points of presence, all located within
30 ms of 95% of the world’s business users. With such a large global network, connecting enterprise data centers
to branch offices, enterprise sites to cloud providers, remote mobile workers to headquarters, and enterprise users to
web applications in distant data centers, Aryaka has the ability to aggregate detailed data about what’s happening,
end-to-end, over the enterprise WAN.
Demographics
A typical Aryaka customer is a global corporation with a presence in more than one international location. Typical use
cases include data transfer or file sharing between their office locations, seamless network connectivity across oceans
and continents, and reliable access to data centers and cloud services for any application, anywhere in the world.
Our solutions are applicable and relevant to all enterprises, regardless of vertical. Therefore our customer base spans
multiple verticals. Some of the top verticals our customer base belongs to are:
• Telecommunications
• Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, and Biotechnology
• Travel, Recreation, and Leisure
• Energy and Utilities
• Real Estate and Construction
• Transportation and Storage
• Financial
• Manufacturing
• Business Services
• Software and Internet
Aryaka’s customer base is made up of more than 550 global enterprises, ranging in revenue from under $10 million to
over $95 billion. These enterprises are connecting over 5000 sites in 63 countries over the Aryaka network, and data
from these 5000 sites was aggregated and used for the purpose of this report.

Aryaka is transforming how global enterprises con-
nect sites and users worldwide and use mission-crit-
ical applications to support modern business execu-
tion demands. Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN combines a
About Aryaka Networks purpose-built private network, SD-WAN, optimization
and acceleration techniques, connectivity to cloud
platforms, and network visibility in a single solution
that is delivered as a service.
> Give it a try to experience the benefits for yourself.

Sign up for a Free Trial.
Next Steps > Questions? Email sales@aryaka.com or
give us a call at 1.877.727.9252.
> For information on other products, services, use
cases or customer success, visit www.aryaka.com.
The performance data collected in this report was gathered over different geographies using the public Internet.
For more information on performance comparisons with Aryaka’s global private network, visit www.aryaka.com.


State of The WAN Report 2017: Do Not Reproduce Without Prior Permission

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

State of The WAN Report 2017: Do Not Reproduce Without Prior Permission

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

State of the WAN Report

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

State of the WAN Report 2017..................................................................02

Key Insights from the State of the WAN 03

The State of the WAN in 2017 04

Enterprise WAN Traffic 04

Traffic Trends To Watch 09

The Need for Speed: Bandwidth Trends...................................................12

Summary and Conclusions.......................................................................33

Methodology and Demographics.............................................................35

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

The Internet Is Not Your Enterprise WAN

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

Key Findings from the State of the WAN

2. Nearly 50% of enterprise traffic is a combination of HTTP and HTTPS.

3. Bandwidth at non-headquarters enterprise sites is reasonably good

4. While certain components of the enterprise WAN are improving, oth-

5. For some regions, inconsistency in the application response time

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

The State of the WAN

Enterprise WAN Traffic

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

Chart 1: Enterprise Traffic by Region:

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

Chart 2: Enterprise Traffic by Vertical

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

Chart 3: Top Verticals for WAN Traffic

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

Traffic Trends to Watch

Chart 4: Top TCP-based Applications for WAN traffic

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

Chart 5: Top TCP Applications - Global - 2015 vs 2016

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

The Need for Speed: Bandwidth Trends

Chart 6: WAN Links Speeds — Global

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

Chart 7: Y/Y Comparison of Growth by WAN Link Size

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

Chart 8: WAN Link Speeds -- Americas

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

A Closer Look at China

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

The Middle Mile Challenge: Application Response

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

• A randomly generated 100KB file is fetched every time.

Minimum Response Time:

Maximum Response Time:

Average Response Time:

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

Unreliability in the Middle East

Findings: Middle East

www.aryaka.com Aryaka Networks, Inc. Copyright 2017

Linking with London and EMEA