“Am I audible?”
Three magic words every only online meeting begins with ever since the pandemic hit us.
Over the past six months, we have all participated in this unusual experiment around remote work. And nothing sums it up better than this meme that is both depressing and hilarious.
Limits were pushed, boundaries were broken, overnight meetings were held, and contingency plans were rolled out. In a very dramatic turn of events that has not occurred in decades, and most probably in recent human history, a majority of the workforce went from office-based to nomadic within a span of 6 months.
Send a thank-you email to your IT team and pat yourself on the back.
But the real task has only just begun.
Up, Up, and Away
Although employers and employees managed to ‘make it work’, 88 out of the top 200 most populous U.S. cities cited some form of network degradation over the next few weeks. According to Broadband Now, median download speeds dropped 24 percent in New York and 38 percent in San Jose, California.
The meteoric rise in online traffic was so steep that streaming services such as Netflix and YouTube decided to reduce their streaming quality — to prevent the Internet from breaking.
Streaming services, however, were not the only network cloggers. Schools, universities, and businesses also became bandwidth hogs as they began live-streaming classes and video conferencing, straining the internet infrastructure even more.
Here are the numbers that speak for themselves –
The live-streaming sector grew 45 percent between March and April, and year-over-year, the industry was up by 99 percent.
The tidal wave of Zoom usage reached 200 million daily participants (paid and free), up from just 10 million in December. MS Teams saw a record 2.7 billion meeting minutes in one day.
That’s a whole lot of internet usage!
The end result – As per an ESG report, 42% of enterprises report that at least 50% of their distributed workforce suffer consistently poor experience with the SaaS apps they use to get their jobs done.
The R in Remote Should Stand for Reliable
When a majority of the workforce goes remote overnight, secure and reliable communication becomes a challenge for employers and employees alike. Even with robust broadband connections, most companies fail to handle the high influx of users trying to connect to the office network from outside.
This is where a VPN comes in (but not without challenges).
Though most businesses allocate a certain network capacity to support a small number of road warriors and remote employees, rarely did anyone anticipate such massive surge that required businesses to multifold their VPN capacity.
To get an idea of the scale, you should know the figures released by NordVPN, which reveals that global use of its business-focused VPNs had increased by 165% since March 11, with the US and the UK usage jumping 66% and 48% respectively.
Adding this extra VPN Capacity could take days or probably even weeks.
Where Do Current VPNs Fail?
The Internet, being a public highway, remains the fundamental problem. Why a public highway? Because it gets congested at peak times, making slowdown and performance degradations inevitable. Your data takes longer to deliver.
Moreover, the congestion leads to packet loss and jitter, delay, transmission disturbances, and variable response times. Most businesses resort to either of these four remedial measures:
- Wait to get better network access
- Deploy multiple VPN Concentrators
- Use alternate methods such as asking your peers to deliver the files and messages on your behalf.
- Use shadow IT to access mission-critical data with third-party apps such as dropbox or other unauthorized applications.
The Aryaka Way
Aryaka’s innovative approach to the problem takes the Internet out of the equation. Aryaka’s Secure Remote Access essentially routes all of the organization’s network traffic through a dedicated, SLA-driven global Layer-2 private backbone unencumbered by public Internet traffic, enabling remote users to connect to any corporate VPN server in the world as if they were sitting next to it.
As a result, IT can easily manage a specific region’s entire workforce using remote VPNs.
You should also know that remote VPN users have two options to connect to the VPN servers sitting in other regions:
- Hopping over multiple providers in dispersed geographies until the traffic hits the VPN server (All of this while undergoing packet loss, jitter, and other performance degradation elements that the Internet inherits by default).
- Fly business class over the Aryaka middle-mile, which reroutes the traffic from the remote VPN user via the nearest Aryaka PoP – The traffic rides the Aryaka core with a guaranteed end-to-end SLA and offboards at the PoP closest to the VPN server, giving you guaranteed performance as if the VPN server is in the same region as the end-user — in any region in the world.
The Deadline to Upgrade Your VPN Was Yesterday
The time to contemplate upgrading your VPN Solution was over six months ago. It is no more time to claim ignorance but to act. In the quest to stay competitive, the proper VPN may be the most important investment you make.
Step up and regain control of your remote workforce with Aryaka’s Secure Remote Access.