Aryaka Channel Chief and VP of Sales Craig Patterson sung the praises of managed SD-WAN as a crucial failsafe for maintaining enterprise network uptime during what he describes as an unpredictable future.

That assumption about the future is based on the history and risk of pathway outages, like intentional or accidental damage to undersea cables that results in "going dark," Patterson said.

"Accidents and foreign interference both need to be considered as part of disaster recovery strategies to ensure networks can adapt in the face of any potential pathway outages," he explained.

He cited recent damages to the Shetland Isle's SHEFA-2 undersea cable and three separate acts of vandalism to a cable in Marseille, France, along with 4 km of Norwegian subsea cable that vanished without a trace.

While these disturbances are often caused by maritime incidents like fishing boats catching both cables and fish while trawling the sea floor, there are more severe scenarios enterprises should consider, "such as foreign powers sabotaging critical infrastructure for geopolitical gain," Patterson said. "Given the current geopolitical atmosphere, enterprises need to consider physical threats to infrastructure within their disaster recovery strategies," he added.

These incidents drive enterprises' decreasing need to rely on carriers and ISPs and increasing desire to put their own protections in place and maintain constant uptime.

After a disaster, it could take a service providers weeks to get its network up and running again. "Having your own failsafe in place," like a managed SD-WAN service, "ensures you're not relying on others and can handle whatever challenges fall at your feet," Patterson explained.

Aryaka touted its SD-WAN path loss recovery and replication services as enabling organizations to plan for the worst by redirecting data so it reaches its destination.

Patterson explained these services are implemented using a patented, lightweight, transmission control protocol (TCP)-like algorithm to recover packet loss and permit the replication of selected traffic on up to two edge links. "If one of the edge links experiences loss, the second link will have delivered the same packets to the PoP [point of presence]. The PoP will then collate and assemble the packets that it received and passes them on," Patterson told SDxCentral.

In addition, Aryaka's path selection tool lets users choose certain traffic routes for the primary edge link and other traffic for the secondary or available edge link. This functionality is especially useful in the case the primary link is congested, "or because even though the secondary link has lower capacity, or it may have lower latency and, therefore, better suited for select applications like VoIP," he explained.

Regardless of the issue, Aryaka praised its path selection for its dynamic, intelligent, and constant assessments to determine the best available link to deliver data.

"We’ve also built core Link redundancy into our network, with Aryaka POPs connected to each other using dual-redundant Layer 2 links, which are continually monitored to ensure their best performance," Patterson added. These links switch on automatically during a failure, and Layer 3 links supplement redundant Layer 2 links "in the rare event" all Layer 2 links are facing outages.