Aryaka activates EU-friendly point of presence

Fully managed cloud-first wide area network (WAN) and secure access service edge (SASE) services provider Aryaka Networks has announced the availability of its latest services point of presence (PoP) in Dublin, Ireland, inside the newly redrawn European Union (EU) boundary.

The company said the deployment was driven by enterprise customer demand for more connectivity across and into the EU from Ireland, anticipating any future divergence on data transfer regulations that may occur as discussions between the UK and EU continue, thus future-proofing Aryaka’s customer base.

The firm believes Europe will continue to see business disruption related to the Brexit transition at physical and virtual borders with relation to goods and services. Noting EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier’s comment that border friction was  “here to stay”, Aryaka said that as a result, businesses are looking to future-proof their data operations with more flexible connectivity strategies in case of future legislative changes, while maintaining the best-in-class application performance they need to weather the demands of digital transformation. 

The new Dublin operation – which joins more than 40 global services PoPs in delivering managed service richness at the cloud edge – further expands access to Aryaka’s managed services and customer experience to 500 million EU citizens, adding to existing Aryaka PoPs within the world’s largest trading block in Frankfurt and Amsterdam, as well as London outside the EU.

During 2021, Aryaka will also establish PoPs in Paris and Moscow. The first “tenants” for the new Dublin facility include a large financial institution with operations in 10 countries, most of them in the EU. Aryaka chose the Irish capital to continue to stay ahead of future changes to legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a cornerstone of data privacy under EU jurisdiction.

Over the past year, Aryaka claims to have gained increasing traction with its network security and private access offerings delivered as-a-service, netting multimillion-dollar subscription deals that include security-sensitive financial services companies, and enabling enterprises to deploy hybrid workplaces for tens of thousands of remote workers.

Furthering its aims in this arena, in early May 2021 it acquired SASE platform provider Secucloud, delivering network security from the cloud. Aryaka claims it can offer customers a “unique” architecture, providing enterprises with a rich set of cloud-edge-delivered managed networking and security services, including SASE for both on-premise and remote workers.

The Aryaka services PoPs, said to be within 25ms of any knowledge worker across the globe, are interconnected via dedicated Layer 2 links, which Aryaka says ensures “best-in-class” end-to-end application performance and link availability. Service-level agreements span last, middle and first mile, and the overall managed service delivery architecture has a customer experience through a single point of contact for issue resolution.

“Aryaka’s new EU facility is a direct result of customer feedback,” said Ian McEwan, the company’s chief revenue officer. “As we are now serving our largest-ever customers, we strive to offer a level of flexibility our competitors cannot match. This new generation of customers want alternatives to the status quo of large carriers. Aryaka’s new facilities mean they can protect their businesses, regardless of any future political change. This is a smart, forward-looking move for our customers.”