Cloud Connectivity Providers Explained

Cloud Connectivity: It’s probably safe to say that enterprise, private and hybrid cloud are here to stay. These services have vastly improved the way in which we deliver resources, support new types of users, and create new types of business strategies. Continuing growth in adoption of public services means that even the most risk averse organisations are looking at the many ways to leverage cloud computing environments to help their businesses become much more agile. Spending on cloud network, infrastructure and platform could rise to around $203 billion by 2020, according to the IDC Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Spending Guide. Admittedly, the same report suggests that only around 5% of total worldwide technology expenditure in 2017, $122 billion, will be cloud related. Some of the rest of the $2.4 trillion will be from traditional in-house delivery, consumers (20%) and tellingly from software (20%). It stands to reason a proportion of the expenditure will be on Cloud Connectivity.

One of the main barriers regarding adoption is security, along with reliability, access and compliance related to data location. These issues raise the perfectly legitimate concern of “How do I create a cloud connectivity strategy that will allow me to leverage my on-premise investment and public architecture?”

Cloud connectivity enables the interoperability between on-premise resources and public environments. The on-premise environment can be a branch office, the IT services division, a third party data centre with colocated equipment, or a major enterprise data centre. The obvious goal is to create an optimal cloud network strategy, where the business can adjust or scale according to demand whilst increasing security and availability coupled with decreasing expenditure.

Cloud connectivity uses a variety of secure, and high capacity (fast) connections, to enable organisations to integrate with cloud network, storage, compute, and end user environments. The greatest step forward has been the ease of creating these connections and how they can help transform a business. In the past, these connections were made manually and required a lot of know-how and administration. Today, major providers are offering far easier ways to integrate with your resources. Even further back, access to those resources was made available only via the Internet, which is inherently problematic from the perspective of security, availability and capacity. Think of cloud connectivity as the VIP entrance, avoiding traversing the Internet with everyone else.

Cloud Connect Explainer Video

AWS Direct Connect

Amazon Web Services is easily the most popular. They support compliance-based workloads, integrate with complex storage environments, and even provide new types of workload delivery methodologies. More recently, Amazon has made it even easier to connect into its ecosystem without having to attempt to arrange a peering agreement between the customer network and the AWS public cloud network.

AWS Direct Connect enables a dedicated network connection between the customer network and an AWS Direct Connect location. It uses industry standard 802.1q VLANs, so that the dedicated connection can be partitioned into multiple virtual interfaces.. This allows you to use the same connection to access public resources, objects stored in Amazon S3 using public IP address space for example. Along with private resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances running within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud using private IP address space. All whilst maintaining total network separation between public and private environments. Virtual interfaces can be reconfigured at any time and on the fly in order to meet your changing needs.

This kind of enterprise cloud connectivity comes with very real business benefits:

• Bandwidth controls regarding cost and delivery
• Higher Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for consistent cloud network performance
• Fully integrated with all AWS services
• Greater levels of business and data centre elasticity

If you’re integrating with an AWS environment, make sure to look at AWS Direct Connect. It allows your organisation to directly align with a specific strategy, which can be an all-encompassing extension into the AWS, or you can use a specific AWS service, such as integrating with Amazon S3 storage. The best part is that Direct Connect helps ease the adoption of your specific use case securely and privately.

Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute

Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute allows you to create private connections between Azure data centres and on-premise infrastructure inside your network, be it your data centre or a colocation. Microsoft ExpressRoute connections do not go over the public Internet. The connection architecture allows for far greater reliability, higher capacity (speed), much lower latency, and significantly more security than typical internet connections. Each Microsoft ExpressRoute circuit consists of two connections to two Microsoft Enterprise cloud network edge routers from the cloud connectivity provider and your network edge which requires optional dual BGP connections from the connectivity provider and your network side.

Using ExpressRoute connections to transfer data between on-premise systems and Azure can yield significant cost benefits. For example, you can establish connections to Azure at an ExpressRoute location, such as an exchange provider facility, or directly connect to Azure from your existing WAN network, such as a multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) VPN provided by a network service provider.

There are several benefits to using this type of cloud connectivity:

• Data centre and services extension
• Building an ecosystem for hybrid applications
• Creating an architecture build on auto-scaling and provisioning
• Integrating Active Directory services across multiple locations

With Microsoft ExpressRoute, you can establish connections to additional Microsoft services, not only Azure. These include services such as Office 365, Skype for Business and CRM Online. Connectivity can be from an any-to-any (IP VPN) network, a point-to-point Ethernet network, a VLAN via Smart Network or a virtual cross-connection through a connectivity provider at a colocation facility.