Aryaka SD-WAN & SASE Review & Demo | Reducing App Sprawl

Your company is in the market for an SD-WAN or SASE solution and you are trying to figure out which vendors are worth your time to evaluate.

In this video, I do a full demo and review of Aryaka, explain what makes them uniquely multifunctional, show you their orchestrator portal, and tell you exactly where they are and are not the right fit.

Want a demo and quote on Aryaka or their top competitors? Ask me today.

About Me

Mike Smith has been helping companies select the best telecom, WAN, security, and cloud services since 1999. He founded AeroCom in 2003, and has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards, including being recognized as one of the top 40 business people in tech-heavy Orange County, CA. Follow Mike on YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and SpiceWorks.

Transcript

If you would like my recommendation on the best SD-WAN and SASE vendors your company should be quoting, or if you want a demo or quote on Aryaka specifically, do not call them directly. Send me an email or give me a call at 714.593.0011. I am a broker for all the major SD-WAN and SASE service providers in the industry and I have been doing this for over 20 years. I will get you better pricing on Aryaka than if you call them on your own, make sure you get the right salespeople to work with, and oversee the demo and quoting process from start to finish. It will not cost your company anything. Join the thousands of other companies who have used me to help their company make a better decision in a fraction of the time. Also do not forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel and go check out AeroComInc.com where you can read and write reviews on providers and filter by features.

The Five Tool Baseball Player Analogy

If you are a baseball fan, you know what a five tool player is. A player who can hit for average, hit for power, throw, play defense, and run. All five tools in one player. Think Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Ken Griffey Jr., Mookie Betts, and Mike Trout. Shohei Ohtani is considered a six tool player by some. These players are extremely valuable because they are multifunctional. Their team does not have to go out and buy those skills from multiple players. They get all of it in one.

That is how I think about Aryaka. Aryaka is a multifunctional company, and when I think about their competitive advantage, that is the first thing that comes to mind. IT departments value multifunctionality because fewer vendors means less complexity, less security sprawl, and a more secure overall environment. The more applications your data passes through, the more exposure you have. Consolidating into a single platform addresses all of that at once.

What Aryaka Actually Does

Aryaka’s SASE and SD-WAN solution includes a full featured software defined wide area network with WAN optimization, secure access service edge, cloud access security broker (CASB), data loss prevention (DLP), secure web gateway, DNS filtering, ZTNA, and ISP procurement and management.

You might be thinking that a lot of SASE vendors claim to do all of those same things. And you are right. The difference with Aryaka is that most vendors making those claims are delivering half-hearted efforts on several of them. Aryaka’s solution is genuinely full featured and robust across each one of those capabilities. That is what sets them apart.

Their SD-WAN: Built From the Ground Up

SD-WAN was Aryaka’s first product and it shows. Aryaka has a global private layer 2 backbone with 42 global points of presence staffed with their own badged employees. Most vendors with global POPs are leasing them and not staffing them with their own people. Aryaka owns theirs.

Most SD-WAN solutions are on-premise only and in my opinion are really just glorified firewalls connected to the public internet. A lot of legacy firewall vendors are claiming they do SD-WAN but what they are actually doing is very limited. I believe it is better to start as a great SD-WAN vendor and add security than to start as a great security vendor and try to bolt on SD-WAN. Aryaka built SD-WAN first and that gives them a real advantage.

The benefits of Aryaka’s global private backbone are lower latency, lower packet loss and jitter, better security, and easier control. This really stands out for companies with global locations or sites in latency sensitive regions like China. Aryaka also has express routes to all major cloud applications like AWS and Azure.

WAN Optimization

On top of SD-WAN, Aryaka’s WAN optimization is not a lightweight add-on. It is a genuinely robust solution comparable to what you would get from a dedicated WAN optimization vendor like Silver Peak, including deduplication, compression, and SMB optimization.

Security: On Premise and in the Cloud

What I really like about Aryaka’s security solution is the ability to enforce security policies either on premise, in the cloud, or both simultaneously. Small offices doing split tunneling can have security enforced on premise for traffic going straight to the internet and security enforced at Aryaka’s POP for traffic going to their network. On-premise security enforcement is better for employees sitting in large offices. Cloud-based security enforcement is better for remote users. Aryaka gives you both depending on the use case.

This also means that if your company purchased its own firewalls recently and is not ready to replace them, Aryaka will only charge you for the SD-WAN bandwidth and you can split tunnel internet traffic directly through your own firewall at no additional cost from Aryaka. That flexibility is extremely rare and something I do not see from most vendors.

ISP Procurement and Management

If your company has dozens or hundreds of sites and 20 or more ISPs globally, having a single vendor procure and manage your ISP links is a meaningful value add. Aryaka can procure the ISP service, manage your existing ISP services, or do both. For large organizations, that kind of centralized management saves real time and reduces the number of vendor relationships your IT team has to manage.

Single Pass Architecture

All of Aryaka’s multifunctional capabilities run on a single pass architecture. Your data does not get pushed through multiple separate applications performing encryption and decryption at each stage. Everything happens in one pass. That means lower latency and a more secure environment overall. The more applications your data passes through, the more exposure you create. Single pass architecture eliminates that problem entirely.

The Orchestrator Portal

Aryaka brings all of this multifunctionality together in a single management portal called the Orchestrator. Here is what it looks like in practice.

The homepage gives you a clean snapshot of your entire network at a glance. Site status, WAN optimization overview, remote users, and a visual map of your network. Color coding makes it immediately clear what is healthy and what needs attention. Green is a healthy on-premise access point. Purple is a virtual location like a data center. Pink is a remote user. Blue is a hosted cloud application. Red is an error. Yellow is a warning.

The portal also shows threats prevented, customizable alerts, and top 10 applications across your network. The AI insights are particularly useful — you can view network and application activity, see traffic details down to the individual user level, drill into logs, and customize policies all from the same screen.

If you have Aryaka’s ZTNA enabled, analytics on connected users are available in the same portal. If you have Aryaka’s SD-WAN, you can manage sites, view physical versus logical paths, and drill into individual connections. If you have Aryaka’s security, you can manage all your security policies and see a visual of how your policies flow in order through each security engine. That visual alone is a major troubleshooting advantage because instead of jumping between multiple applications to find what is being blocked and why, everything is in one place.

When creating a new policy, the smart approach is to set it as a log only policy first, review the logs, and then switch it to active when you are ready. The portal makes that workflow straightforward. And if Aryaka is managing your ISP links, that is managed inside the same portal as well.

Pricing Is Now Very Competitive

If you have watched my previous videos comparing SD-WAN and SASE vendors, I noted in the past that Aryaka was on the pricier side. That has changed. Over the last couple of years, Aryaka has significantly improved their pricing and they are now one of the most competitively priced options in the market. You are getting a full featured, genuinely multifunctional platform at a price that competes well against the field.

When Is Aryaka the Right Fit?

Aryaka is a great fit if your company primarily needs an SD-WAN solution today or knows it will need one in the near future. If your company is only looking for SASE, ZTNA, or security by itself and has no SD-WAN need now or in the foreseeable future, there are other vendors that may be a stronger fit for that specific use case. Aryaka can do ZTNA standalone, but that is not where they shine brightest. However, if there is even a hint that SD-WAN might be on the roadmap, Aryaka is absolutely worth putting on your shortlist.

Want a Demo and Quote on Aryaka?

Do not call Aryaka directly. Send me an email or give me a call at 714.593.0011. I am a broker for Aryaka and all the major SD-WAN and SASE vendors, I have been doing this for over 20 years, and I do not charge your company anything to work with me. I will get you better pricing, the right salespeople, a great demo, and honest recommendations on whether Aryaka is the best fit or if a competitor belongs on your shortlist alongside them. Do not forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel and check out AeroComInc.com. Thanks for watching. I will catch you on the next one.