SDN, the key to a successful multi-cloud strategy.

Multi-cloud adoption has accelerated in the past few years as more and more enterprises turn to public cloud platforms to support new and changing ways of doing business.

According to a survey by Gartner, 81% of public cloud users say they are working with two or more providers and putting more of their operations into services like Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services¹. Among the reasons for doing this are to increase agility, avoid or minimise vendor lock-in and to take advantage of best-of-breed solutions.

However, the benefits of multi-cloud are contingent on the network that connects the enterprise to the cloud environment. Within an enterprise, different departments may be using different clouds across different geographical locations. Workloads and data that are stored in one cloud may have to be moved to another and back again. To optimise the benefits of the multi-cloud environment, the network needs to have the same level of agility as the enterprise applications, the compute stack and data storage that it has to interoperate with.

Achieving this can be an uphill task. Enterprises need to be able to connect different cloud environments on a global scale. As they attempt to do this, they will realise that connecting directly to each cloud service provider is costly, and the environment will become increasingly difficult to manage as more data and services are moved into the multi-cloud environment.

The increase in complexity also adds to the cybersecurity challenge facing enterprises today. Lack of visibility makes it difficult to detect and track sophisticated attacks and opens the environment up to a wider range of security breaches, cyber-attacks and vulnerabilities.

To roll out an effective multi-cloud strategy, the enterprise will need to have a cost-effective, flexible, secure and scalable networking solution that will enable it to connect workloads in geographically dispersed public clouds and deliver the business benefits of cloud as quickly as possible.

One of the most promising solutions for achieving this today is the use of a software-defined network (SDN) to build a flexible, high-performance multi-cloud environment.

In an SDN, the network control plane which carries signalling traffic is decoupled from the data plane, abstracted from the network hardware and implemented in software. This makes the control plane programmable, allowing for much greater flexibility in network administration.

Traffic can be shaped from a centralised console without network administrators having to physically configure individual switches. The software approach also paves the way for more automated provisioning and policy-based management of network resources. Rules and policies can be set to prioritise, de-prioritise and even block specific types of packets. 

With these capabilities, the SDN makes it much easier for an enterprise to build and manage a multi-cloud environment. Instead of connecting to several cloud providers, the enterprise connects its network to an SDN overlay that is already integrated with multiple cloud services. This gives enterprises a low-latency direct link to the cloud, enabling them to bypass the public Internet for greater security and reliability. At the same time, management of the multi-cloud environment is simplified with use of a single console to oversee the enterprise’s assets and workloads across distributed geographical locations.

By providing a single secure cloud connection to multi-cloud providers, the SDN simplifies access to cloud services and helps the enterprise to avoid vendor lock-in. Connectivity can also be activated on-demand via a convenient self-service portal, allowing the enterprise to provision or scale up bandwidth in a matter of minutes. This enables the network to respond quickly to changing demands and allows the enterprise to adjust and adapt the cloud environment to their business needs as they evolve over time.

The programmability of the SDN also paves the way for the use of automation to further simplify network management. For example, enterprises can define an automated process to establish connectivity with multiple clouds and scale this across regions at minimal cost and complexity. Automated processes can be established for policy-based routing, enabling traffic to be sent across the most efficient links based on uptime and performance requirements.

Enterprises can also push the envelope and harness Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for other network management tasks such as incident response. RPA will enable them to accelerate and simplify response without the need for human intervention and deliver faster time-to-resolution.

As enterprises look to multi-cloud to address their transformation needs, networking considerations can make or break the success of their cloud strategy. The cloud has the potential to deliver greater agility, flexibility and scalability to the enterprise. To realise these benefits, the networking solution that connects the enterprise to cloud services will have to be just as agile, flexible and scalable. And this is best achieved through a software approach to connectivity, with an SDN.

Find out how SDN can help you build a successful multi-cloud strategy.


¹ Gartner, Why Organizations Choose a Multicloud Strategy, May 2019.