Aryaka SD-WAN Netify Review

Aryaka Unified SASE – Demo of MyAryaka Customer Portal

Single Plane of Management: My Aryaka

This portal allows customers and partners to access their accounts, view service performance and network utilization, and manage their billing.

I will be focusing on six main use cases for My Aryaka:

1. WAN Performance: Through MyAryaka's portal, you can get insight into your Wide Area Network (WAN) performance. The portal allows users to visualize the entire site's WAN traffic, including data from various ISPs and MPLS.
2. Security Observability Control: This feature helps users monitor their network's security configuration, volume of traffic, and overall health. Keeping track of the security services that Aryaka provides is crucial for maintaining a secure and efficient network.
3. Troubleshooting Alerts: MyAryaka sends alerts and corresponding notifications to inboxes to help users quickly identify network-related issues. This proactive approach ensures a faster response time to resolve any problems.
4. Last Mile Circuit Management: Unlike other vendors, we offer transparency about potential service outages and SLA violations. Users can access this data on the portal and even claim credit for disruptions.
5. Contract Management: MyAryaka makes it easy to review the services purchased, deployment progress, and identify any discrepancies. This comprehensive tool ensures proper resource allocation and expenditure tracking.
6. Traffic Analysis: An essential feature to monitor the volume distribution and flow of network traffic. Users can gain insights into the predominant applications used, their corresponding bandwidth utilization, and any potential congestion risk.

My hands-on experience with Aryaka's Unified SASE was driven by the MyAryaka management portal. The portal's interface immediately offering a straightforward overview of network health and utilisation. This ease of navigation and instant visibility of network status is needed for quick deployment and future decision making.

Monitoring WAN performance across real-time data on application usage and site health was presented in a user-friendly, colour-coded format. Although colour coding sounds relatively simple, managing network congestion proactively is made so much easier when IT teams are able to immediately understand view data points. The ability to set customisable alerts was another standout, allowing me to receive notifications directly in my inbox about significant network events, such as bandwidth threshold breeches. Aryaka reporting is the enabler to maintaining optimal network performance without constant manual checks.

Below: Aryaka VPN Paths showing network traffic.

Last Mile circuit management is one of the main areas of value offered by Aryaka. The Aryaka pricing teams source global connectivity from multiple ISP's based on SLA and price. MyAryaka provided detailed insights into ISP connections, which was particularly useful for efficient management and troubleshooting. The self-service configuration options within the portal makes it simple to request real-time changes, such as modifying firewall policies or connecting to cloud security services.

In my hands-on test of Aryaka's SASE Cybersecurity, I began configured the firewall through Aryaka's interface. Setting up SASE began with setting up rules and policies tailored to specific applications and network layers. This step is needed to setup zone-specific security.

I tracked user logins and session activities to observe Aryaka's response to various user behaviours and traffic patterns. Setting up and testing alerts for events such as bandwidth thresholds proved responsiveness and reliability.

A critical part of the test was examining SSL interception - I deployed SSL-encrypted traffic and monitored Aryaka's ability to decrypt and analyze, which helped to assess effectiveness across handling encrypted data while maintaining security.

Finally, I tested change management by adjusting firewall rules to demo the ease of implementing changes and the Aryaka's capability to maintain security and network performance post-change. Aryaka's SASE solution demonstrated a high degree of customisation, security, and adaptability.

MyAryaka's SLA provided detailed reports, allowing IT teams to view and understand potential SLA violations. These reports help maintain service quality which, in many ways, is emulating legacy MPLS SLA's which are more granular compared to Internet connections. In addition, Aryaka contract management tools offered a comprehensive view across service agreements to simplify management of all elements of the Aryaka solution.

Below: An important aspect of Aryaka SD-WAN is their SLA reports.

Aryaka has demonstrated measurable improvements over the last few years, especially across SASE Security which was a notable omission from their SD-WAN product. Today, Aryaka has incorporated zScaler and Palo Alto into a fully managed SASE solution.