Why your network infrastructure may not be cloud-ready
Ron Budden
Product Manager SD WAN/SASE
It’s no secret that organizations worldwide are turning to the cloud to enhance their operations, improve scalability, and drive innovation. However, while the ambition is there to migrate workflows to cloud or multi-cloud environments, execution requires further strategic planning. Currently, many enterprise network infrastructures are not ready to handle the demands of increased cloud adoption.
Understanding how to design a cloud-ready network will empower your cloud strategy and ensure you see a return on investment.
How does cloud computing fit into IT infrastructure?
Cloud computing has transformed the way businesses manage their IT infrastructure. Rather than using traditional on-premises data centers, cloud environments are being used for greater flexibility, scalability, and cost optimization.
cloud adoption fits into IT infrastructure by providing:
- On-demand resources: Cloud services and applications offer scalable resources that can be adjusted based on demand. Eliminating the need for overprovisioning and reducing costs. These span from tools for collaboration, design, CMSs, CRMs, communication, and much more. You can really form a tailored portfolio of cloud services and applications to suit the specific needs of your business and expand your IT infrastructure.
- Enhanced collaboration: Cloud platforms enable seamless collaboration among teams, regardless of their physical location. This fosters innovation, productivity, and creates a truly global company. Rather than setting up complex IT infrastructure in every location, cloud computing can plug-in and provide everyone in every location access to the tools they need.
- Disaster recovery and backup: Cloud solutions provide robust disaster recovery and backup options. This ensures business continuity in case of data loss or system failures.
- Security: Cloud applications increase the surface area of attack your company is vulnerable to. So it’s important when you use the cloud that you also increase your security posture so that it also covers your cloud environment. Secure Access Service Edge’s (SASE) cloud-based security solutions are a great way to do this.
As you can see, the cloud can having far-reaching impacts on your network. When you choose a cloud strategy, you need to invest in your network to see the full benefits of the cloud.
This is where the challenge lies for many businesses.
Can your network keep up with multi-cloud demands?
Key considerations for assessing whether your network can keep up with multi-cloud adoption demands include:
- Visibility and control: Having comprehensive visibility and control over your network traffic is essential for managing a multi-cloud environment. Ideally you need a single tool you can use to see your entire network’s health. Including overlay and underlay, down to site level. This allows you to identify issues, optimize performance, and ensure compliance all from one place rather than multiple platforms. Additionally, you need a simplified view that can be used by different stakeholders across the business.
- Bandwidth and latency: Multi-cloud environments require high bandwidth and low latency to ensure smooth data transfer and application performance. Insufficient bandwidth or high latency can lead to performance bottlenecks. This can impact the performance of your applications, which causes user frustration and impacts the cloud strategy itself. Accenture revealed that for large organizations, more than half of the network budget can be spent on bandwidth alone. But when you add cloud services in those bandwidth needs can grow 30% each year.
- Reliability and redundancy: Network reliability and redundancy is critical in a multi-cloud setup for a consistent user experience. Network failures can lead to significant downtime. They can disrupt business operations as people cannot access the applications they need to complete tasks, collaborate or communicate.
- Security: Multi-cloud environments require robust security measures to protect data as it moves between different from on-premise to the cloud. Both in transit and at rest. This includes encryption, firewalls, and secure access controls.
In summary, if your current network struggles with any of these aspects, it’s not cloud-ready. And ultimately this could impact the cloud strategy you are deploying.
How to design a cloud-ready network:
For many organizations, cloud adoption has been handled as a way of improving the network infrastructure. Often with a patchwork approach to integration. Rather than simply adding cloud capabilities to an existing infrastructure, it's crucial to rethink and redesign your network. Consequently, this will allow you to fully embrace the benefits of the cloud and maximize your return.
SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) has emerged as a key connectivity solution to include in your cloud connectivity strategy. It provides the necessary agility, security, and performance required for cloud-first strategies.
Here's our framework for designing a cloud-ready network with SD-WAN at its core:
- Assess current network capabilities: Begin by evaluating your current network infrastructure to identify gaps or limitations in areas like bandwidth, latency, security, and reliability. You can then address these issues as you build out your SD-WAN architecture.
- Upgrade network hardware: While hardware upgrades like routers, switches, and firewalls are essential, SD-WAN complements these upgrades by enabling seamless integration with cloud services. SD-WAN facilitates efficient routing of traffic across multiple locations. This optimizes performance and ensures low-latency connections, which are critical for a cloud-first strategy.
- Implement SASE as your security foundation: SASE is a cloud-based solution integrating network security and WAN services. It offers features like data loss prevention, Secure Web Gateway, CASB, FWaaS, and unified policy management. Ensuring secure, scalable, and centralized access for modern enterprises across various cloud environments.
- Start with SD-WAN for both security and strategy: Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) secures your data at the edge as it moves between different locations and cloud services. It uses encryption, firewalls, Zerto Trust protocols, and much more. It also adds in a layer of intelligent automation, as SD-WAN can dynamically adjust to changing network conditions and prioritize critical applications.
- Think multi-cloud: No organization will have all of its workloads in a single cloud platform or with a single cloud provider even. When managing a multi-cloud environment, ensuring optimal performance for critical applications is crucial. SD-WAN’s application prioritization capabilities allow you to dynamically allocate network resources. Ensuring that your most important applications get the bandwidth and low latency they require. This approach enhances agility, flexibility, and resilience across your cloud platforms. Enabling you to seamlessly manage workloads across different providers while maintaining a high-quality user experience.
- Improve application performance: With SD-WAN prioritizing your cloud traffic to the closest PoP, an Enhanced Internet solution can accelerate that traffic via the best-performing route to where the cloud application is hosted. That means lower latency end-to-end, and increased user performance. Our Enhanced Internet IP nodes are precisely mapped to the Data Center footprint of major cloud providers. This maximizes coverage and enables us to cater for the use cases and locations that your business needs.
- Improve network visibility and monitoring: Use network monitoring tools to gain real-time visibility into network performance and identify potential issues before they impact operations. This helps in maintaining optimal performance and making informed decisions. Expereo provides every customer access to our Intelligent Internet platform, expereoOne. Ultimately giving you visibility of your entire network infrastructure, overlay and underlay, down to site level.
- Partner with a Managed Service Provider (MSP): As you can see, designing and managing a cloud-ready network can be complex. Partnering with an MSP that specializes in SD-WAN and cloud connectivity simplifies this process. Similarly, MSPs bring the expertise, technology, and resources necessary to optimize your network for cloud adoption. They can ensure your enterprise can fully leverage the benefits of a cloud-first strategy.
Ready to reach your digital future faster with seamless cloud adoption?
Expereo is here to help you design and implement a cloud-ready network that supports your digital transformation. Whether you're looking to upgrade your infrastructure, deploy SD-WAN solutions, or enhance your network security, our team of experts is ready to guide you through every step of the process.