Teridion's cloud-based SD-WAN service is now available in mainland China. The managed SD-WAN service provider said it aims to help multinational enterprises with branch offices in China shift their traffic off of costly MPLS connections and onto low-cost broadband.

Following a regulatory change by the Chinese government in 2017 that effectively blocked IPsec VPN tunnels in and out of the country, many companies were forced to rearchitect their WANs. And as a result, MPLS became the network of choice for many, said Pejman Roshan, VP of products and marketing at Teridion.

"Enterprises have been hamstrung with low-bandwidth MPLS that's been really expensive," he said.

To achieve this goal, Teridion worked with the three major network operators in the country — China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile — to develop a network that could operate in compliance with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT)'s regulations.

Teridion built an orchestration layer on top of the network in Alibaba Cloud to dynamically distribute bandwidth on demand to the enterprises that need it.

"For example, if an enterprise has one site I can go give them a gigabit per second. If they have five sites, I can distribute all of that gigabit or multiple gigabits per second across those sites on the fly. I don't have to go order a circuit or provision bandwidth," Roshan said.

Teridion isn't, however, using its own SD-WAN software. The company instead acts as a kind of handler or guide for enterprises' existing SD-WANs — including those from Cisco Meraki, Fortinet, Citrix, and Palo Alto Networks — allowing traffic to move seamlessly in and out of the country without interference by the so-called great firewall of China, according to Teridion.

The company claims its service can be configured on partner hardware in a matter of minutes and deployed in hours using an IPsec connection to Teridion's points of presence (PoPs) in China.

Despite operating on the Chinese networks, Teridion claims its connection remains encrypted from end to end.

Roshan acknowledges there are still security risks, but argues those issues are no different than those faced by enterprises using IPsec tunnels prior to the change in regulation.

"It really comes down to if an enterprise is willing to put their traffic over the internet with IPsec, they have to believe in IPsec," he said. "If they don't, then MPLS or private circuits is the path they have."

Teridion is not the only company doing SD-WAN in China.

In the past two years, larger players including Versa, Silver Peak, and Nokia's Nuage Networks entered into partnerships with China Telecom to provide SD-WAN services over MPLS and broadband.

Aryaka entered into a similar partnership with China Mobile in 2018. However, unlike its competitors, Aryaka operates a private Layer 2 network built on excess capacity purchased from Tier-1 and Tier-2 service providers.