NOTE: This blog exists as part of a six part series.
The adoption of cloud technologies over the past decade or so has been nothing short of fascinating. In the not-so-distant past, organizations were hesitant to extend their network and highly-valued customer data beyond the brick-and-mortar of their private data centers. However, they pivoted in a very short time and aggressively transitioned their business applications and data to the cloud.
Digital transformation imperatives have been the cornerstone of this pivotal change in direction. Businesses, in their need to accelerate revenue growth and achieve operational excellence, have embraced cloud technologies as a business tool to be leveraged, and not feared. As a result, product development, IT DevOps organizations, and internal operational organizations, are highly incentivized to leverage cloud services to deliver results. For these organizations to be successful, they need the flexibility to select best-in-breed cloud partners, immediate availability to initiate development; and the portability to distribute the workloads to teams around the globe.
Unfortunately, the quick pivot to the cloud has unveiled a few significant issues with the current business networking technologies that were developed over the past 25 years. These were meant to serve a relatively static and strictly hierarchical business data distribution model behind the corporate firewall. They were never intended to serve the immediate elasticity, scalability, and portability required for today’s global cloud marketplace. Further complicating this environment is the fact that the major global cloud computing providers are not integrated with each other with each providing their own computing, networking, security, and on-premise solutions. The outdated networking solutions portfolio and the lack of a unified hybrid multi cloud environment acts as a governor to a development environment that requires flexibility, immediate availability, and portability. Furthermore, Day-2 support of this disjointed networking and cloud environment gives rise to manually intensive, costly, and tedious change management processes. These processes include the necessary support of networking, security, and application architects for even the smallest of changes and open the door for simple mistakes that can leave business data and operations at risk.
As global cloud connectivity and processing capabilities have advanced, there has been another trend associated with application development that is converging that will have a similar tectonic impact on business as the rise of cloud computing. Support for applications built on microservices architecture is in its infancy and proliferating. This next generation of software architecture is popular due to its support for the continuous development and deployment of new revenue-producing products and features.. The convergence of global cloud computing and the micros services software architecture presents a perfect storm for the next generation of application development for a globally-connected community. This perfect storm of distributed application workloads, continuous improvement and innovation, and scalable and elastic global computing resources, will reshape the user experience in ways we cannot imagine, and it will happen rather quickly.
To meet current challenges associated with hybrid multi cloud platforms and prepare for future application technologies, 3nets has engineered 3nets | CloudNavigator™ solution from the bottom up. the 3nets solution will further accelerate the speed of digital transformation projects by delivering a cloud- native networking fabric that simplifies the existing hybrid multi cloud operational environment while at the same time enabling next-generation applications throughthe 3nets intelligent network fabric and application-aware framework. At the same time, we deliver the required architectural agility necessary to support next-generation technologies such as networking artificial intelligence (AI), microservice cluster SLAs, and the Internet of Things (IoT) deployments.
Our visionary cloud-native design takes a next-generation application-centric approach to inter- networking across hybrid multi cloud environments to overcome the existing problematic layered approach of the current connectivity and support model. We deliver an architecture that integrates applications with the underlying network. The following pillars are the foundation of the 3nets design:
