Global enterprise wide area network (WAN) traffic saw an increase of 200% annually, with almost 50% of enterprise traffic composed of cloud and SaaS traffic, according to the latest study from Aryaka.

Aryaka has collated data of enterprise WAN traffic from over 5000 sites in 63 countries in different industries over the past four years to analyse trends, response times and inconsistencies in application performance, WAN reliability and bandwidth access. The report analyses the threshold of the network inconsistencies to affect mission-critical applications over a medium. It also examines conventional application performance time over the public Internet.

WAN traffic increased 248% in Asia-Pacific in 2016 owing to the increased use of cloud technology, Aryaka added, while the use of 100 Mbps links in China last year increased by 25%.

By industry, WAN traffic increased the most in the manufacturing vertical. Network traffic increased 526% in the software and Internet sector, whereas real estate, energy and utilities, and travel industries saw an increase of 200%. A combined 50% of all WAN traffic can be seen coming from HTTP and HTTPS. Aryaka also added that with improved Internet bandwidths and quality, the hand-off between ISPs over the Internet needs to be improved. Latency, packet loss, and jitters need to be addressed when data is transferred between long distances.

Shawn Farshchi, Aryaka president and CEO, said: “With nearly 50% of all global enterprise traffic now comprising cloud and SaaS, and legacy technologies, like MPLS, failing to address this trend, the ability to address the needs of the business translates into better business execution and competitive advantage.”