According to Gartner, client interest in cloud networking has gone up five times in the past 12 months as enterprises note that the native networking capabilities of public cloud providers are often insufficient for some of their production workloads, slowing down development and time to market.
Cloud networking looks after network resources and how these are managed, connected and controlled in the cloud. For example, it provides resilience, elasticity, automated network testing and updates. Cloud networking automates highly complex tasks while delivering unprecedented levels of centralized control and visibility over the cloud estate to ensure it is fully optimized and delivers on business value.
Within a cloud networking model, all an organization’s network resources are hosted in the cloud, including routers, firewalls, bandwidth and network management. It provides connectivity between applications and workloads wherever they reside. This simplifies operational complexity and offers centralized management, visibility, governance, security and policy across all clouds. All are available on demand and managed by the in-house IT team or a third party.
Analysts estimate that today 92% of enterprises have a multicloud strategy, and 82% have a hybrid cloud strategy. And on average, enterprises use 2.6 public and 2.7 private clouds. This expanding cloud estate makes management and visibility extremely difficult. Cloud networking can use a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model to provide complete visibility and ongoing analysis into deployments and the network’s overall health.
But, as Gartner points out, networking features and operational approaches vary widely across cloud providers, creating cracks in the overall system and management challenges with multicloud deployments. Cloud networking can fill these gaps and significantly improve operational efficiencies.
Enabling consistent networking features and management
Connectivity between clouds is becoming more complex, especially with the increase in cloud native and composite applications built for specific cloud environments. Cloud networking is an obvious route where clouds would otherwise have disparate capabilities. Gartner advises that to overcome workload shortcomings from cloud providers, enterprises should increase their investments in cloud networking solutions offered via consumption-based pricing with well-documented APIs to meet the needs of cloud and DevOps teams.
For example, we currently have one international customer with 309 virtual private clouds (VPC). They expect this figure to rise to 5,000 VPCs in the next two years. Enabling consistent features and management is impossible without cloud networking. In addition, the beauty of cloud networking is that it can be deployed in multiple cloud environments numbering private, public and edge locations and can be self managed or delivered as a service.
Orange Business has been quick to recognize the benefits of cloud networking. For this reason, we have teamed up with Aviatrix, which provides an enterprise cloud networking platform that allows enterprises to deploy a high availability multicloud network data plane. We provide the platform as a managed or integrated service.
The cloud networking platform delivers a single, common platform for cloud networking, regardless of the public cloud providers used. It provides end-to-end and high-performance encryption, multicloud security domains and operational data repeatable across clouds – providing a consistent experience across clouds.
Orange Business cloud networking orchestrates and automates otherwise complex and manual connectivity processes. At the same time, it aggregates critical data about the network, security connections and configurations centrally.
The solution enables enterprises to take back control, reduce costs and speed deployment, while also giving visibility of their cloud estate and shifting focus from attempting to manage disparate clouds on networks to controlling a consistent global cloud network.
A single network. Many clouds
Every cloud is different. Each cloud provider has different networking architectures and limitations. Enterprises can attempt to find time-consuming workarounds or build a single, connected multicloud architecture. The latter is the ultimate destination for any enterprise looking to get real depth and scalability from their cloud investments.
Moving to cloud maturity
We can support our customers through their entire cloud maturity journey from end to end.
Multicloud networking addresses multicloud and distributed cloud in large cloud deployments where infrastructure as code (IaC) is a prerequisite. IaC is the automatic managing, monitoring and provision of resources via code rather than manual configurations.
For single cloud and less mature deployments, we provide cloud networking services based on hyperscaler native tools and services.
To find out more about our cloud infrastructure solutions designed to enhance your multicloud strategy, click here.
Dave van Meer is Head of Solutions at Orange Business in Netherlands. He brings 20 years of extensive leadership in the Consulting and Managed Services ICT industries. As in his career, he also values relationships in his private life and is people centric. He loves to spend time with his family and friends. His lifetime hobby and sport is volleyball, on the court and on the beach.