Managed SD-WAN vendor Aryaka today announced a partnership with Chinese public cloud provider Alibaba to better address connectivity within the region.

Under the agreement, Aryaka will provide a cloud on-ramp into Alibaba Cloud, and the cloud provider will offer Aryaka's SmartServices portfolio from its marketplace with the help of partner reseller Netbank. Aryaka’s SmartServices platform offers connectivity, application acceleration, security, cloud networking, and insights leveraging global orchestration and provisioning.

The partnership is a significant one for Aryaka, explained company CMO Shashi Kiran in an interview with SDxCentral. "Alibaba Cloud is the No. 1 public cloud provider in the Asia Pacific region, No. 1 in China and No. 3 worldwide," Kiran said. "It's a huge human footprint coverage as well."

Customers can now deploy their applications to the Alibaba Cloud with the same degree of consistency they would get with other cloud providers, Kiran said. This, he adds, is ideal for customers in China that need seamless, high-performance connectivity to sites outside the country. Likewise, enterprises operating outside China can take advantage of Aryaka's private network to connect to sites inside China and on the Alibaba Cloud without having to coordinate a mess of MPLS links and carrier handoffs.

"I think we provide a much more elegant, way more graceful way, and a more simplified way," he said.

The partnership also helps to address a common challenge for the increasing number of enterprises doing business in China. Due to data privacy rules, it is often necessary to host applications in China.

"This is something we are seeing increasingly across governments all over the world. They are looking to ensure that data privacy and there is compliance with their regulations," Kiran said. "This is where I see us having these localized points of presence and being able to conform to the local requirements of each government, as well as the data privacy requirements, and at the same time be in a position to deliver the application performance predictably is somewhat unique today."

The partnership also helps to further extend Aryaka's ability to support multi-cloud deployments. To date, the vendor has announced similar capabilities with U.S.-based cloud providers including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Oracle Cloud.

The goal, Kiran explains, is to provide easy access to customer applications regardless of which cloud they are running in.

“By combining Aryaka’s technology with Alibaba Cloud’s robust network infrastructure, customers will be able to achieve unparalleled application performance through this partnership in China and globally,” said Selina Yuan, president of international business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.