Driven by the surging demand for urban freight and the popularization of instant logistics models, the urban logistics industry has entered a period of rapid development. Diversified businesses such as same-city distribution, inter-city transportation, and corporate logistics continue to expand, bringing multiple challenges including complex capacity scheduling, dense node distribution, and increased difficulty in network collaboration.

Since its launch, a leading internet logistics enterprise has integrated social capacity resources through a sharing model, building an intelligent logistics network covering more than 300 cities nationwide. With over 10 million monthly active users, its business encompasses multiple scenarios such as same-city freight, inter-city transportation, and cold chain less-than-truckload shipping, ranking among the top three globally in terms of closed-loop freight GTV. As its business expands rapidly and explores overseas markets, the enterprise’s traditional network architecture has gradually exposed performance bottlenecks and management difficulties in headquarters collaboration, public cloud access, and cross-border access.

Industry Pain Points: Balancing Multi-Regional Expansion and Efficient Collaboration

1. Complex Branch Networking, Urgent Need for Unified Management: The enterprise has laid out warehousing outlets and capacity scheduling centers in more than 300 cities nationwide, resulting in a large number and diverse types of branches with a highly fragmented network architecture. Traditional networking methods struggle to meet the requirements of nationwide centralized management and unified policies, leading to the headquarters’ lack of real-time visibility into regional network operations, low configuration management efficiency, and constraints on unified business scheduling and efficient collaboration.

2. Extensive Use of Public Cloud Resources, Growing Cloud Migration Demand: The enterprise’s daily operations rely heavily on cloud-based systems, with key modules such as order matching, intelligent scheduling, and customer service deployed on public cloud platforms like Alibaba Cloud. As business volume grows and scenarios diversify, data traffic becomes increasingly dense, imposing higher requirements on public cloud access quality, link stability, and security.

3. Overseas Business Expansion, Need for Accelerated and Secured Cross-Border Access: With the enterprise’s gradual expansion into the international market, overseas warehouses and scheduling nodes have been established successively. Some cross-border links have begun to experience issues such as high latency and packet loss, affecting overseas order scheduling, user interaction, and system linkage. Cross-border network acceleration, compliance, and security have become urgent new challenges in the process of global business development.

GLINK Customized SD-WAN Solution: Building an Intelligent Interconnection Foundation for the Logistics Industry

To address the above pain points, GLINK has tailored an Epoch SD-WAN solution for the logistics enterprise:

1. Unified Networking Architecture to Improve National Branch Management Efficiency

Targeting the complex management caused by the large number of branches and fragmented network architecture, GLINK deployed Epoch SD-WAN devices at each site. Combined with MSTP or local internet links, the devices connect to nearby GLINK PoP nodes and then converge uniformly to the GLINK MPLS backbone network, building an end-to-end unified wide-area interconnection architecture. Through the SD-WAN control platform, centralized configuration, unified policy issuance, and real-time visibility of device status are achieved, significantly improving network management efficiency.

2. Intelligent Cloud Acceleration to Ensure Stable Operation of Core Businesses

To meet the logistics enterprise’s high-frequency access needs for core cloud-based systems such as order matching and intelligent scheduling, the GLINK solution uses Epoch SD-WAN devices to identify cloud business traffic and implement intelligent routing. Key data can be directly connected to Alibaba Cloud nodes through the backbone network, bypassing north-south interconnection bottlenecks to ensure link stability and access efficiency. The solution has built-in intelligent DNS protection against DNS pollution and supports SSL VPN remote access, enabling flexible cloud access for multiple roles such as scheduling centers and customer service terminals, and supporting stable system operation under high-concurrency business scenarios.

3. Optimized Cross-Border Access to Support Compliant Global Business Expansion

To support the enterprise’s overseas business expansion, GLINK uses the BGP intelligent traffic splitting capability of SD-WAN to optimize domestic and foreign traffic distribution. Overseas order systems and cross-border collaboration platforms can quickly go global through the backbone network. Combined with behavior auditing devices at PoP nodes, it ensures compliant and controllable overseas communications, providing high-performance, low-latency, and full-audit network support for global logistics links.

Network Efficiency Improvement and Scheduling Collaboration, Empowering Steady Overseas Expansion

After the solution was implemented, the logistics enterprise achieved unified access and centralized management of branch networks nationwide. Network configuration efficiency increased by 70%, and O&M response time was significantly shortened, ensuring the efficient operation of warehousing scheduling and distribution collaboration. The quality of cloud business access was fully optimized, with the stability of key systems improved to 99.99%, supporting high-concurrency processing of massive orders. Cross-border link latency was reduced by an average of 60%, and the access fluency of overseas nodes was greatly improved, strongly supporting the enterprise’s international business expansion.

In the future, GLINK will continue to work with customers to deeply integrate AI, cloud, network, and security technologies around scenarios such as intelligent scheduling, global collaboration, and digital intelligent O&M, building a more flexible and resilient global logistics network foundation, and helping enterprises enter a new stage of high-quality development.