Enterprises are continuing to accelerate the migration of workloads to public cloud service providers – such as AWS, Azure, Oracle and Google – often as part of an overall digital transformation and cloud-first IT strategy. According to LogicMonitor, more than 80 percent of enterprise workloads will be in the cloud by 2020. Businesses need a multi-cloud solution that provides them with an integrated environment to migrate workloads between multiple public clouds, or between private and public clouds.
In addition, enterprises require multi-cloud solutions that can be custom-tuned for specific applications, as well as provide the ability to port workloads from one public cloud to another for additional flexibility and resiliency – this is where SD-WAN comes into play.
Turning to a multi-cloud strategy with SD-WAN
In this new multi-cloud era, businesses are often faced with an entirely new set of questions and challenges, which can be daunting and confusing. For example, how do businesses use the internet to connect users securely and directly to cloud applications? How do they ensure the performance for every business-critical app? How do they keep pace with WAN changes without going device-by-device? How do they deploy new applications quickly to thousands of sites, across multiple clouds? How do they see everything and always know which WAN issues to focus on? How do they reduce human error in an ever-changing environment? How do they make sure their WAN always keeps pace with the business? And how do they protect their business when cloud is open and connected?
To counter these complexities, organisations are turning to service providers to deploy and manage SD-WAN, a virtual network architecture that enables enterprises to secure private and public cloud connectivity between branch offices and larger corporate data centres, for any cloud application, using any transport.
SD-WAN enables cloud connect solutions that are well suited for extending an SD-WAN between multiple clouds and data centres, as well as delivering high-performance connectivity for all software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) applications, from any on-net or off-net location. It’s easier and more efficient to route traffic from branches and to establish local internet breakout for trusted SaaS applications.
Flexible policies, defined in a single cloud management console determine the best path every time, utilising any underlying transport, whether it’s internet, MPLS or LTE.
Benefits of a multi-cloud strategy with SD-WAN
A multi-cloud strategy provides enterprises with custom networking solutions for cloud environments that suit different business needs, as well as cloud diversity using the best available network services. Moreover, it enables efficient cloud-to-cloud inter-connectivity, supporting workload migration, backups, DCI and load balancing functions. By turning to a best-in-class SD-WAN, enterprises realise a range of business benefits, including:
- Consistent deployment branch to cloud: Seamless support for cloud deployments enables enterprises to extend the reach of their SD-WAN deployments into virtual private cloud environments to deliver the highest quality SaaS and IaaS applications
- Strengthened last mile broadband for cloud connectivity: Advanced SD-WANs ensure quality of service over broadband to provide fast and reliable connections to the cloud provider’s internet peering point. For hosted voice or business-critical SaaS services, enterprises can backhaul that traffic to cloud-hosted SD-WAN for handoff to the cloud provider’s backbone and out to the internet, delivering peak quality for select traffic
- Cloud flexibility: With a business-first SD-WAN platform, enterprises in the early stages of formalising public cloud strategies can confidently migrate on premise IT resources to any combination of leading public cloud platforms, knowing their cloud-hosted instances will be fully supported
- Multi-cloud flexibility: Enterprises now have choice in public cloud platforms, making it easier to initiate multi-cloud deployments and distribute resources across multiple cloud providers, deploying the best, or most economical, services from any combination of cloud providers. With an advanced SD-WAN, enterprises can accelerate data access, dramatically reduce the amount of data transferred and optimise application performance between cloud instances
SD-WAN: Win-win technology
With SD-WAN, enterprises can realise the full benefits of a multi-cloud strategy, while, at the same time, service providers can capitalise on its simple management and speedy deployment.
Service providers can easily enable application performance-boosting capabilities for cloud-to-cloud communications within the SD-WAN network infrastructure, without installing any new software or deploying any additional virtual network functions (VNFs). Moreover, SD-WANs enable tiered managed services that allow service providers to offer full-mesh connectivity with secure, high-performance links between all clouds. It also assures low latency connectivity and creates new monetisation opportunities through differentiated services that accelerate the “cloudification” of applications, using both public or private cloud services from online and offline locations.
As SD-WAN adoption accelerates, businesses can capitalise on the cost-effectiveness, integrated connectivity advantages and flexibility that multi-cloud environment provides. At the same time, managed service providers can further leverage SD-WAN to offer flexible, high-performance multi-cloud diversity, while reducing the stress and complexity of enterprise migration.
Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.