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China’s “Great Firewall” is many things, acting as a gigantic security net for Internet traffic going in and out of the country. Formally known as the Golden Shield Project, one thing the firewall is good for is degrading network performance. For companies located outside of China, this presents an interesting challenge.

According to a recent blog post from Teridion, a company specializing in optimizing network performance, organizations that wish to sell applications and services in China are best served by working with a carrier, reseller or partner in the country. They point to Flexport, a freight shipping analytics company that does business in China. While Flexport owns no infrastructure and has no direct relationships in the country, they use partnerships to help other companies ship into and out of China, effectively brokering shipping relationships.

Teridion follows a similar philosophy when it comes to moving network traffic in and out of the country. The company partners with Alibaba Cloud in China, taking advantage of the cloud providers’ many global and regional partners to move traffic around the country. The result is improved network performance for Chinese users, not an easy feat to accomplish.

“To put it in perspective, last week I was working with a company that had intermittent availability issues from an end user located in China,” wrote Bill Zajac, sales engineer at Teridion. “The application was hosted in Europe due to data privacy reasons.  When the application was not timing-out due to network issues, tests ran using the public internet were getting blazing speeds of 20kb/s-100kb/s.  Switching on Teridion upped the transfer rate to 2Mb/s consistently.  This is opening up a whole new territory to a company who thought their only choice was to shard their application closer to China.”

Teridion accomplishes these network improvements through its network of Teridion Cloud Virtual Routers to intelligently route traffic, optimizing available network resources. Offered on a SaaS (News - Alert) basis, Teridion’s solution requires no additional hardware but offers all the insights on network traffic that a local application server would provide. Very simply, it’s the next best thing to doing business directly beyond The Great Firewall.