Collaboration between SD-WAN providers and cloud service providers helps easily manage cloud connectivity across multiple cloud providers and create a secure, low-latency, cloudy environment.
As SD-WAN becomes the primary access for remote users to cloud-based applications, and organizations that deploy cloudy environments to optimize performance. It is important for IT professionals to choose a secure, low-latency, easy-to-use SD-WAN technology – a management connection to the cloud provider.
What is multi-cloud?
multi-cloud is the use of two or more cloud providers to be able to flexibly run applications on the most appropriate platform, and most companies have accepted it.
Most IT organizations mix internal data centers, applications deployed on the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform, and multiple Best Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. These multi-cloud environments may be realized through mergers/acquisitions with other companies or the desire of end users to quickly deploy new applications on cloud-based platforms. Regardless of how they achieve this goal, IT organizations are now responsible for the security, management and quality of user experience for all cloud-based applications.
Each cloud environment has its own strengths, weaknesses and cost profiles. For example, most legacy applications and some new applications may remain in the internal data center for security, compliance, and cost reasons. Each IaaS platform has a unique development environment and associated ecosystem that makes it suitable for certain types of applications. For example, Amazon AWS is for e-commerce applications, Microsoft Azure for applications designed around SQL and Active Directory, and Google Cloud for Kubernetes-based container applications.
Each SaaS platform has the best application and cost profiles for unified communications, office suites, CRM, accounting, and more.
The challenge for IT leaders is that each IaaS or SaaS provider has a unique set of services, security mechanisms, APIs and management tools. To optimize the quality of the user experience, IT must navigate the connections provided by each IaaS and SaaS provider, such as the provider’s local presence. Most IT leaders say managing this complex combination of multi-cloud resources is challenging.
SD-WAN function
SD-WAN combines multiple physical WAN links into a single logical network and provides traffic prioritization to accelerate application performance for on-premise and cloud-based applications. Using network abstraction, SD-WAN improves the economics of branching connections by enabling organizations to take advantage of the growing bandwidth requirements with inexpensive circuits such as the Internet. SD-WAN is an overlay technology that maps new services over existing physical networks – application prioritization, security, and management.
SD-WAN can be deployed on-premises by IT professionals or as a hosted service by a range of service providers. SD-WAN technology continues to improve features, including enhanced traffic identification and routing, enhanced network security, and better centralized management.
SD-WAN improves multi-cloud access
SD-WAN leverages its application identification and traffic steering capabilities to better support secure access to multi-cloud environments. IT professionals can set specific business policy metrics for each application and cloud environment and are enforced by the SD-WAN platform. They must prioritize mission-critical applications based on how much delay they can tolerate. For example, IT can set different policy profiles for low-latency traffic, such as unified communications, voice, video, office productivity applications, and general email.
To improve security, IT can set policies about which traffic should traverse which WAN link, such as private MPLS and the public Internet. The SD-WAN platform provides visibility into traffic sources and destinations that can be used for blacklisting to block and whitelist acceleration. They can also isolate suspicious traffic. Encryption and micro-segmentation at the application or platform level can also be used to increase security.
In response to customer needs, SD-WAN providers have increased the ability to identify and route cloud-based traffic. They have established partnerships with leading IaaS providers to accelerate traffic to local presence points. They can launch virtual instances of their SD-WAN platform on the leading IaaS platform (mostly supporting Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure). The SD-WAN platform also identifies the IP addresses of most leading SaaS providers to apply the appropriate business strategy.
SD-WAN is a mainstream technology that enables secure and reliable remote and branch user access to applications, no matter where they are located. SD-WAN application identification, traffic control and security features help IT connect and manage access across multiple cloud environments.
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