Much has changed in the enterprise connectivity industry in the last decade. MPLS has given way to SD-WAN, but some things remain the same. Enterprises still need global connectivity and China continues to remain a mystery.
Developing the economy alongside complex challenges
Since opening up to foreign trade and investment and implementing free-market reforms in 1979, China has been among the world’s fastest-growing economies, with real annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth averaging 9.5%. A pace described by the World Bank as “the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history.”
With this fast-evolving market, international trade with China can be very appealing for global enterprises who want to expand their business, but also, the Chinese market poses a complex challenge due to its size, market diversity, political system, trade conditions and currency fluctuations.
The other challenge foreign companies which operate in China are facing, is the need to rapidly extend their wide area network to support and enable connectivity between their sites, while operating according to the Chinese government regulations from 2018 (MIIT/CDTIA) that limit the IPsec traffic transforming in or out of the country.
From technological creativity to optimal connectivity
To get through this obstacle while maintaining optimal connectivity, there are several solutions, such as SD-WAN or MPLS. Both can be alternatives but also contain some major disadvantages such as high cost, long installation time that can take months dealing with the bureaucracy of the Chinese government and, above all, connectivity performance that goes pretty fast within China, but when traffic has to pass through the Chinese Great Firewall, connectivity performance drops significantly.
For these reasons, we developed our WAN as a Service Solution for China. This advanced SaaS solution eliminates deployment high cost and complexity with high performance. With fast setup, global coverage, unbounded bandwidth and horizontal scale, we can deliver unparalleled connectivity for our customers who operate in China.
With our Teridion Cloud Routers (TCRs), and more than 500 PoP’s around the world, we can leverage a private routing infrastructure at the cloud edge within China to establish the fastest path, at any given time, between a source and a destination. This approach provides accelerated access from one user site to another, or from user to enterprise SaaS applications and cloud workloads.
Our customer can easily manage their Chinese sites with Teridion’s Portal the same way they manage sites outside of China.
Finding the right path to results
Here’s a good example of the effectiveness of our solution to China that we’ve deployed for one of our customers – a leading enterprise with 34 locations and 3,000 employees worldwide. Connectivity performance and loading speed are critical components of his business. While most of the company’s offices in the world had good connectivity, the Data Center in China, which was based on local infrastructure including the ‘Great FireWall’, suffered a significant decrease in connectivity performance. Our customer needed to find a solution that would deliver performance to users in China on a consistent basis and do it quickly, economically, and securely.
With Teridion’s Internet overlay network, we managed to reduce latency by at least 75%. Load times that previously were measured in minutes were reduced to seconds, with China averaging a latency of under 100 milliseconds.
Along with this dramatic improvement in speed and usability in the Chinese market, we allowed our customers to deliver a consistent service without ramping up costs or burdening customers.
If you have sites within China or you’re planning to expand your business soon, don’t waste your time trying to cross the Great China firewall by yourself. Let us do the work.
Book a demo and our experts will be happy to assist you and share some further information.