Cloud-hosted services give employees real-time access to applications wherever they are. Sometimes, however, performance issues strike and cause employee productivity to slow to a crawl.

Microsoft’s Office 365 is not immune to the problem. Demands on the network, synchronization with Outlook, software updates, template downloads and more can affect performance.

The problem is the Internet is not designed for global software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and can’t provide the performance levels those applications need, said Gary Sevounts, chief marketing officer at Aryaka. The performance can be so bad that Office 365 customers have wanted to roll back their installation of the application, he said.

To help remedy the problem, Aryaka created Office 365 Acceleration, which provides private connections to Microsoft Azure through a private, optimized, business-grade cloud overlay network.

It gives users a global private network that provides higher reliability, faster speeds, lower latencies and higher security than typical connections over the Internet and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), Sevounts said. It offers up to 40x faster application performance for Office 365 across global locations and up to 99.5 percent bandwidth and data reduction, he said.

Now, through a partnership with Microsoft, Aryaka customers can connect directly to the Microsoft Office 365 cloud via Azure ExpressRoute.

“By offering Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365 over its software-defined network platform, Aryaka is providing enterprises with enhanced network performance and consistent, accelerated access to the Office 365 cloud,” said Ross Ortega, Principal Manager, Azure Networking at Microsoft in a statement.

Many organizations use Microsoft’s cloud products, including Azure, Office 365, Dynamics CRM and SharePoint. With ExpressRoute, they can establish a direct connection to these cloud services, providing security, more predictable network performance and the ability to better manage network capacity and costs, Sevounts said.

“Our employees used to frequently complain about the slowness of Office 365, which was running over the Internet,” said Kenny Gilbert, CIO at InvenSense, an Office 365 Acceleration customer. “We needed a high-performance, cloud-ready wide-area network that could make our lives easier. With Aryaka’s Office 365 acceleration solution, our employees experienced terrific performance improvements all over the world. The ability of Aryaka’s solution to connect to cloud providers like Microsoft is phenomenal and truly helps businesses like us to leverage the benefits of SaaS.”

Photo credit: Patrick Bombaert via photopin (license)