The China Challenge: How to connect your China locations to the U.S
Whether you’re a manufacturing, engineering, or retail firm, global enterprises are aggressively expanding into China. China-based locations need reliable and optimized connectivity to global resources. Typical business requirements include high quality WAN connectivity to the datacenter for voice, ERP and remote desktop applications, and optimized Internet access to cloud resources such as Office 365, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure.
If you are used to the reliable and affordable connectivity of North America and Western Europe, extending your network globally could prove challenging. Here is what you need to consider. The connectivity challenge in developing countries is twofold: the quality of last mile infrastructure to remote locations and the high latency of global connectivity.
Internet last mile connections are often less reliable due to poor physical infrastructure or an oversubscribed connection shared by many businesses (such as with cable or ADSL). The situation is improving with countries upgrading their infrastructure, such is the case in China.
When delivering applications across long distances, latency and packet loss will determine application performance. This established fact becomes critical for China connectivity. The long distances and poor Internet peering between China and the rest of the world exacerbate latency. In addition, due to regulatory oversight, traffic leaving the country must be inspected by a central firewall (also known as the “Great Firewall of China”). The firewall enforces Chinese regulations regarding the use of Internet and cloud services. As a result, global Internet-based connectivity from China exhibits high packet loss and high latency.
What are the options for business-grade connectivity out of China?
Internet VPNs Are Not an Option
Recent changes in the regulatory environment in China tightened the controls around the use of encrypted links (i.e, site-to-site VPN tunnels) crossing the central firewall. SD-WAN edge solutions, that rely on public internet VPNs to establish datacenter or cloud connectivity, can be disrupted or perform poorly at any given time.
Private Lines
MPLS private lines are an expensive option, which can work well for WAN connectivity, assuming the MPLS provider can effectively peer with the enterprise data center MPLS provider. This option is sub-optimal for access to cloud resources due to the need to backhaul the traffic to a secure Internet exit.
Software-defined Backbone
Software-defined backbone providers, such as Cato Network, use private links via authorized carriers to exit traffic from China to Hong Kong. Cato’s approach it to route the traffic globally over its SLA-backed backbone applying multiple traffic acceleration and packet loss mitigation techniques. WAN traffic is specifically optimized to reach the Point of Presence (PoP) closest to the datacenter, and cloud traffic egress near the cloud instances used by the enterprise.
As businesses go global, they are looking for reliable and cost effective connectivity from China. This is a great opportunity to solve a customer’s pressing need, and then expand the solution to support other global and regional locations. To read more about how to deliver a reliable, high performance WAN and cloud connecton in-and-out of China, read our eBook here.
This article was provided by CATO Networks.