A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives, a curated forum for enterprise technology leaders, nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the CIOApplications Editorial Board.
According to Flexera’s 2021 State of the Cloud report, over 92% of enterprises now have a multi-cloud strategy, and while IT may not be responsible for commissioning the services, network managers certainly have a role to play in optimising the access and the cloud connectivity experience delivered.
A multi-cloud approach can introduce more network complexity because provisioning direct connections to multiple clouds is no easy feat - and as digital transformation strategies mature, organisations increasingly require the ability to transfer data between multiple clouds or across multiple geographies.
Here we look at three key connectivity challenges facing IT professionals as they embark on their multi-cloud journey:
1. Multi-cloud data transfer
For organisations that use multiple different cloud providers, it is a common requirement to transfer data between different clouds. This may just be for the purposes of aggregating data but could also be due to different teams working in different environments across distributed cloud applications.
For some applications there are also considerations that may require hosting in an on-premises data centre or a cloud instance located in a specific geographic location. These might be business-critical apps, those that have high throughput, require low latency, strict security needs, or have geographic stewardship requirements such as data that needs to be hosted in a specific location due to GDPR.
So, for example there might be the need to move stored sensitive personal data from an Azure environment in a European country, where it is required to rest for GDPR purposes, to a Google Cloud Platform environment in another country to be computed, before pushing the results back to Azure.
Or, we might have a situation where an organisation has its ERP application installed in IBM Cloud, but it needs to call data from a storage lake in an Amazon S3 environment. In these cases, the native networking offered by one cloud provider is not typically consistent with that of the second cloud provider, causing issues with performance and reliability.
Interconnecting different brand cloud providers may be a frustrating but perhaps predictable headache. What often comes as a surprise though is that moving data between different geographic instances of the same cloud platform is not as straightforward as you might think.
Confusingly, all the cloud providers seem to have different approaches to cross-region data transfer and their own specific lexicon and definitions to go with it.
A common pitfall is that an organisation transferring a large amount of data from a public cloud environment in one region (Asia for example) to the same public cloud in another region (Western Europe for example), can be hit by hefty charges for traversing the cloud provider’s backbone between regions.
Furthermore, this often isn’t so easily solved by deploying dedicated connectivity to public cloud instances, because the network router will ‘think’ the data is staying within the one cloud instance and leave it be, when in reality it’s travelling across the world on the cloud provider’s native connectivity (as a chargeable transfer!).
Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) is a solution for taking the complexity out of managing direct access to a multitude of different cloud providers.
Understanding this can be a headache, not least because the rules differ from provider to provider, but also because some data transfer types are charged only one-way (either in or out), while others have one fee when going in and another fee for outgoing transfers or between different zones or regions.
3. Disaster Recovery
To avoid vendor lock-in and single points of failure, many organisations rely on multiple cloud infrastructure providers for automated data backup and recovery. This process requires reliable connectivity to and between different clouds, with native redundancy.
Although multi-cloud is often championed as offering best-of-breed, it can increase the amount of resource and infrastructure overhead needed to support from a redundancy perspective.
In many cases, multi-cloud redundancy requires that you set up a primary version of the application and data set on one cloud, then you do it all over again on a secondary cloud as a ‘standby’. But connecting these clouds together is no easy feat.
Unfortunately, as we discussed above, there's no incentive for different cloud providers to provide a single co-defined open API for connectivity, which means a lot of work to access different clouds and even more work to get different clouds to talk to each other.
So, whether an organisation is doing a backup or a failover into Azure or a backup into Alibaba there are different API endpoints to contend with and different workflows happening behind the scenes.
How a Network-as-a-Service platform can help
As businesses run more and more critical services in the cloud - from ERP and CRM (Customer Relationship Management), to billing systems - they are looking to take this traffic off the internet, with a view to improving security, resilience, and reliability as the data moves between data centres, public clouds, and different regions around the physical world.
This is where Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) has stepped in, as a solution for taking the complexity out of managing direct access to a multitude of different cloud providers.
Console Connect’s new CloudRouter® is a multi-cloud interconnection service that simplifies inter-cloud connectivity, providing private Layer 3 connections between cloud providers and, by extension, cloud-based applications without the need for additional hardware. The solution can help address the three key connectivity challenges highlighted above, while giving businesses greater control and flexibility with their cloud connectivity.
