NOTE: This blog exists as part of a six part series.
The traditional networking infrastructure was designed for business operations three decades ago when most business applications were centralized in data centers. Almost 100 percent of the data traffic (and underlying Enterprise IP networking) was based on a simple hub and spoke model. This model allowed the employees working in the branch offices (spokes) to gain access to the network by plugging into that network and connecting over the Enterprise WAN to applications hosted in the private corporate data center (hub). This model had some of the following features:
The traditional networking infrastructure was designed for business operations three decades ago when most business applications were centralized in data centers. Almost 100 percent of the data traffic (and underlying Enterprise IP networking) was based on a simple hub and spoke model. This model allowed the employees working in the branch offices (spokes) to gain access to the network by plugging into that network and connecting over the Enterprise WAN to applications hosted in the private corporate data center (hub). This model had some of the following features:
The last 10 years have seen few events that rival Y2K in terms of their disruption. It would have been virtually impossible to predict the quantum of changes that the networking ecosystem has witnessed in the last few years. The business operations and the IT supplier market have both taken leaps into the future in terms of operational efficiencies.
The playing field for businesses today has been tremendously impacted by the mass adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing (AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, etc). The continued advancements in mobile networking and aggressive digital transformation have changed the rules of the game. Added to all this, the impact of the global pandemic (Covid) has exploded the remote networking bandwidth requirements. features:
With hybrid cloud computing becoming the norm, organizations split their business applications between low-cost global public cloud providers and private data centers. This has led to the explosive expansion in the scope and the reach of the cloud interconnect bandwidth, dwarfing all others before the advent of cloud networking. The pandemic has almost ended the enterprise branch office environment as the employees have become comfortable with the remote work culture, prompting organizations to evaluate the need for maintaining satellite offices. Data security is no longer limited to data centers but has become exponentially complicated as enterprises have expanded their borders beyond private data centers to cloud providers, colocation spaces, and mobile devices/desktops. The good old black phone (enterprise PBX) has given way to an IP-PBX or a cloud-based SaaS, providing users with a unified voice and video services via a desktop application.
Moving to the cloud requires migrating legacy systems and moving workflows to the cloud. This is not something done overnight, as network and security architectures need to be approved, and workflows are rewritten to address the new environment.
Cloud computing has disrupted the “IT economy” and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. With the advent of cloud technology, there has been a massive power shift in terms of global connectivity and the previous Enterprise networking infrastructure.
The ISPs of the “old” world power order are now acting as access or aggregation providers. While at the same time, they are seeing increased pressure from cable providers and 5G providers as the mobile workforce has exploded.
Cloud computing companies are the new inter-networking superpowers. Whether hosting enterprise applications or hosting SaaS services (Salesforce, Zoom, Confluence, etc.), the migration to these major providers has been tectonic. Most businesses have moved to the cloud. Initially, these deployments were hybrid cloud deployments, where the business's private data center was sharing the workload with a single cloud vendor. However, business leaders, in their quest to obtain best-in-breed solutions, while avoiding vendor lock-in, are migrating toward a multi cloud environment, where workloads utilize their private data center and multiple cloud providers. This architecture is here to stay, as enterprise leaders prefer the flexibility and privacy of their environment for some workloads, and the computing power and scalability of cloud providers for other workloads.
However, this model does not come without its challenges. The complexities involved in managing hybrid-multi cloud with multiple computing securities, storage, and networking user interfaces within vendor-specific portals are crushing IT, security, and networking operational organizations. The risks associated with the potential inconsistent application of change of management and security policies are a big cause for concern.
With businesses continuing to move forward with digital transformation projects, and business IT assets and data increasingly becoming a competitive weapon, the need to address these operational challenges has to become a priority. For the applications and the network they run over to become seamless, the network needs to be simplified and automated. All of these challenges can be overcome with a single pane of management that easily integrates on-prem data centers and multi cloud providers without exposing the underlying complexities to the user. This single pane of management can enable the organization to scale up or scale down, create new networking topologies, and integrate best-in-breed cloud services, without too much of a hassle.
