Teridion unwraps cloud-based SD-WAN service for enterprises

Teridion is rolling out its route optimization and cloud-based SD-WAN service to enterprises to offer them MPLS-like service level agreements (SLAs.)

San Francisco-based Teridion originally built its network overlay for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies such as Atlassian, Ignite, Fox, Salesforce, and Western Digital, but with today's release of Teridion for Enterprise its bringing some of the same performance benefits to enterprises.

Pej Roshan, Teridion

The internet wasn't designed for high performance traffic and flexibility, but rather for resiliency, said Teridion's Pej Roshan, vice president of products and marketing.

"The designers of the internet wanted to make sure that there was no single point of failure anywhere in the internet so that if you have routing failure, that package could still manage to get to its destination," Roshan said in an interview with FierceTelecom. "But there's no accounting for how fast or how the internet is performing. There's no feedback loop, it's not a metric that's included as a part of BGP. To add to this, to kind of exacerbate the issue, a lot of in the internet, the peering that occurs between service providers and cloud providers, is typically done based off of price. That doesn't always bode well for applications because again you're not insuring high performance."

"Today, however, over 80% of enterprises have moved some or all or of their applications into the cloud and some or all of their data center workloads to a cloud data center. So now the impact that that's had on traffic is that a lot of that east-west traffic between a branch and headquarters is now going directly from the branch and directly from headquarters to the cloud itself. So you got a lot of north-south traffic now."

As part of the shift to the cloud, enterprises have been rolling out SD-WAN services that in theory cost less than MPLS, but some of those SD-WAN services are bogged down by slow internet speeds.

Teridion sees the public internet connectivity of SD-WAN as a chokepoint for enterprises. Roshan said Teridion for Enterprise provides reliability and performance that's consistent with MPLS, as well as "MPLS-like SLAs."

Since it's cloud-based, Teridion doesn't have its own hardware deployed within customer branch offices, but its service does work with new SD-WAN appliances as well as older branch-office routers. The enterprise SD-WAN cloud service is integrated with third-party SD-WAN services from Silver Peak, VMware/VeloCloud, Cisco Meraki and Citrix .

Teridion also has partnerships with 25 cloud partners, including Microsoft Azure, Google and Amazon Web Services. Roshan said Teridion's worldwide 300 virtual points-of-presence (vPOPs) are located in the cloud providers' POPs, which, in addition to increasing its global reach, allows Teridion to dynamically route its traffic across the best available POP.

Teridion's curated routing makes the real-time decisions on routing. The company's multicloud orchestrator ingests application performance data along with measuring throughput, loss and latency across the internet. Teridion uses deep learning to process the data find the best performing routes across a number of sites and the location and applications that are being used at each site.

"We've taken our IP  and our network that we've built for SaaS providers, and we've developed Teridion Curated Routing," Roshan said. "We have over 25 different public cloud partners that we use for our WAN service. We're in their networks and we're using their networks to build out our virtual network for enterprises. Inside each of their networks we have a little monitoring agent. It's a little container that is doing some very simple monitoring around throughput testing, latency testing and packet loss testing and that raw data, which is generated about every five minutes, is then sent up to our management system.

"This management system is deep learning. It's taking all of this raw data, it's sifting through it and it learns interesting things. It learns that okay, Amazon has this type of performance profile, DigitalOcean has this type of performance profile and so on, and it's establishes these baselines. With these baselines it knows when things are good, it knows when things are bad, in a given provider's network."

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In a matter of minutes, all of that information is used to find the best data centers, POPs, and networks for each data stream.

"The customer is then able to point to our network via a simple IPSEC configuration on their existing SD-WAN equipment or their existing branch office router," Roshan said. "We've partnered with leading SD-WAN companies, but we also work with existing branch office routers and gateways. They point to us, once they connect, which takes again, just one simple config change, the network switches on, it starts accelerating the traffic, and the enterprise WAN is built. Again, this can be built globally in a matter of minutes."

Roshan said that Teridion most often competes with Aryaka Networks, but he noted that Aryaka has 30 POPs on its private global network compared to Teridion's 300 virtual POPs. Roshan also said private networks were more expensive to use than using the public cloud.

 "We are focused on doing WAN, on doing it exceptionally well, and our differentiation is the fact that we've built this on the public cloud, which enables us to provide an MPLS comparable SLA and do price points that are along the lines of broadband internet," he said.