SD-WAN for Office 365: Aryaka Helps eLearning company, City & Guilds Group, Improve Office 365 Application Response Time

LONDON, April 18, 2018 -- Aryaka®, the leading global SD-WAN provider, announced today its SD-WAN technology has enabled City & Guilds Group, a worldwide leader in workplace skills, eLearning, and executive coaching, to achieve faster Office 365 application response times leading to an increase in productivity and better collaboration between users in Europe and Asia-Pacific.

Headquartered in London, the City & Guilds Group works with education providers, governments and major corporations to help shape and support skills development for employers in over 100 countries.

Team members of the company are similarly scattered around the world and primarily collaborate using Microsoft Office 365 applications, but many remote users were struggling to access the group’s instance of Office 365 hosted in Dublin.  For example, it could take over 37 seconds to open one file from the corporate SharePoint drive. Besides leading to a high number of user complaints, the performance issues limited adoption of Office 365 for global employees.

“Our users in Wellington, New Zealand, saw delays between 10-15 seconds opening a standard Microsoft Word document, which obviously was impacting productivity. We knew this would be a barrier to further collaboration and helping us reach our revenue goals,” said Alan Crawford, CIO for City & Guilds Group. “It’s important to ensure the benefits we provide through group-wide application deployments are equally well received throughout every geographical region we serve.”

“City & Guilds Group tried connecting to local Microsoft clouds, but that did not solve the latency and application performance problems for users in the Asia-Pacific region,” Crawford added.

In their search for an answer, City & Guilds Group ultimately selected Aryaka’s global SD-WAN.   Because Aryaka delivers SD-WAN as a service, City & Guilds Group was able to deploy the solution in an hour.  Users saw dramatic improvements in application performance and could suddenly collaborate on Office 365 in real-time.

Some examples of the application performance improvements they experienced are listed below:

“Our colleagues around the world were able to load their files to SharePoint three times faster, we experienced a 200x reduction in the time to open 10MB SharePoint files, and saw three times improvement in the time taken to upload 10MB files to OneDrive,” continued Crawford. “With Aryaka, our global team members can now collaborate seamlessly and develop learning materials faster for our customers, providing the most current and high-quality resources for employee development. We look at Aryaka as the only SD-WAN for Office 365.”

“As businesses continue to expand globally and participate in merger and acquisition activities, while migrating applications to the cloud, addressing the enterprise WAN is a critical factor for business execution,” said Ashwath Nagaraj, Founder and CTO of Aryaka. “With Aryaka’s global SD-WAN, enterprises can act quickly to capitalize on changing business needs in near real-time, instead of suffering from slow application performance and project implementation delays. We’re delighted to see the results City & Guilds Group has been able to achieve with our global SD-WAN as a Service.”

According the recent State of SD-WAN Connectivity Report, the average time for a 100 KB file to traverse Internet links from Asia to the Americas can be as high as 4000 milliseconds. Companies using a global SD-WAN based on a cloud-native private network like Aryaka’s, achieve on average 4.1 times faster application performance and 2.5 times less variation in response times.

Deployed by more than 800 global enterprises, Aryaka is the leading global SD-WAN provider and has the fastest growing SD-WAN solution in the market today, delivering enhanced performance for cloud and on-premises applications worldwide. Aryaka’s global SD-WAN has quickly become the only viable MPLS replacement for global enterprises requiring alternatives to legacy WAN infrastructures for mission-critical application delivery.

For more information about Aryaka, visit www.aryaka.com.

About the City & Guilds Group
The City & Guilds Group is a leader in global skills development. The group works with education providers, employers and governments in over 100 countries across the world to help people, businesses and economies grow by shaping skills systems and supporting skills development. The Group is made up of City & Guilds, ILM, Kineo, The Oxford Group, Digitalme, e3Learning and Gen2.

To learn more, visit www.cityandguildsgroup.com.

About Aryaka
Aryaka is transforming how global enterprises connect sites and users worldwide, and use mission-critical applications to support modern business execution demands. Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN combines a 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.

To learn more, visit www.aryaka.com. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Aryaka Media Contacts:
Shehzad Karkhanawala
Director of Marketing
Aryaka
+ 1 408-273-8420
[email protected]

Cheryl Billson
Aryaka European PR
+44 7791 720460
[email protected]