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Today, companies operate their IT infrastructure and run applications across many cloud environments. They continue to invest in cloud for easy deployment, flexibility, cost management and performance. Nearly all organizations have embraced a multi-cloud strategy – 93% according to Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report. The pandemic sped up transformation initiatives, and technology partners should capitalize on migrations and improving experience.
With business workloads dispersed across multiple clouds, employees and customers alike can experience troublesome bottlenecking and slow application performance, failing to achieve top functionality and maximum capabilities. Latency is a major pain point for network engineers. Poor WAN performance can be challenging for any organization, as it involves infrastructure that is outside their direct control. Choosing the right WAN solution can make a significant impact as companies increase the number of users connecting to cloud applications, datacenters and other critical business resources.
Supporting Multi-Cloud Strategy
Businesses commonly utilize different cloud services for a multitude of reasons: support their business applications and workloads, capitalize on potential cost-savings, maximize employee and customer experience, maintain overall performance or meet any necessary industry or geographic requirements. Having multiple cloud environments can be a lot to manage, but also adds to considerations when deploying new solutions. Plus, there is the pressing burden of always maintaining the highest level of security, an even greater challenge when you’re talking about multiple workloads being accessed across multiple clouds and with any on-prem workloads.
SD-WAN Solutions
SD-WAN is a viable solution for multi-cloud companies looking to simplify WAN infrastructure while saving on connectivity. SD-WAN offers the ability to mix private and public connectivity, so IT teams can match business-critical applications with highly reliable connectivity, while using less reliable connectivity for secondary applications. This can significantly increase productivity and cut down on connectivity costs. Additionally, businesses can increase reliability by combining private connectivity with public internet connections, so traffic can be rerouted as necessary, bringing fast failover capabilities.
SD-WAN offers automation capabilities and the ability to adequately support rapidly evolving cloud networks. Companies can take advantage of direct connections, using the most optimized links to support their various applications and workloads, while decreasing performance issues caused by too much traffic on the network. The important thing when when evaluating SD-WAN solutions is ensuring that you are meeting necessary cloud capacity and as always – security is a factor.
An effective SD-WAN solution provides application-friendly network infrastructure working across a multi-cloud environment, creating uniformity, improving management and instilling cost controls. There are different considerations when recommending the right SD-WAN solution to properly support a business’ multi-cloud strategy.
Here are some tips:
Find a cloud-native solution that can integrate across the cloud infrastructure. This will help with management, configurations and connectivity across multiple cloud networks.
Look for security features like next-gen firewalls (NGFW) baked into the SD-WAN solution. You want to always be conscious of security and eliminating vulnerabilities.
Identify solutions that meet all cloud requirements and application-aware capabilities to mitigate any bandwidth or performance issues. Ideally, the solution should allow traffic prioritization and the ability to manage connections based on business need.
Centralized, real-time network visibility across multiple cloud applications gives consolidated data to control bandwidth and offer advanced threat detection and preventability. This is especially necessary for compliance requirements and industry regulations.
Review direct connections to major cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure utilized to guarantee service availability. Providing direct data transport to these services delivers lower latencies and packet loss by avoiding the internet.
Contact us to help you on your Digital Transformation journey: info@winnthorn.com
* Excerpts from Stephani Fitzsimmons.