Is Your Network Ready for the Hybrid Cloud?
Many businesses are looking toward hybrid cloud to let them leverage the cloud to provide additional capacity when there’s a surge in demand. Using cloud in this hybrid way means your network is a key element of your hybrid cloud architecture, allowing data and transactions to flow between your data center and the cloud. The network design, with routers, gateways, firewalls, and other controls, has a strong impact on latency and other network performance metrics. Reviewing your network and making necessary upgrades are keys to achieving a successful hybrid cloud solution.
Network Issues in a Hybrid World
You’ll need to make sure you have a solid design for your on-premises network and the connection from that network to the cloud. This requires addressing a range of challenges, including:
- security: Hybrid clouds come with the requirement to move data between your internal site and the cloud. Ensuring that data is protected both in transit and in storage is vital. The split nature of a hybrid cloud can make tracking and identifying threats challenging.
- bandwidth: It isn’t only the raw capacity of the network that matters. The way the network is designed and utilized, including segmentation and load balancing certain workloads, is also important. You may want to rely on the cloud provider’s load balancing capability or implement your own.
- reliability: The network needs appropriate redundancy to ensure robustness and stability. With steps to provide high availability, problems are less likely to impact production users.
- automation: While the network to support a hybrid cloud may be complex to administer, automating as many procedures as possible will simplify the process. This is especially important if you plan to use cloudbursting to push processing to the cloud when demand spikes.
- management: Overseeing a network that supports a hybrid cloud requires having eyes into both internal and external aspects of the network. Use tools that provide a single view over all network elements, whether they support internal or public cloud access. You may want a virtualized network to help manage IPs, firewalls, and load balancers that cross sites.
All of these concerns need to be addressed in order to get the desired benefits from cloud. Flattening the network design is one approach that can simplify network oversight while reducing latency and improving performance.
Review Your Network Design With Experts
Prescient Solutions’ team of experts is certified in network technologies and applies their advanced knowledge to designing the right network for you, whether it simply connects your desktops to a file server in the back room or connects an entire data center to additional capacity in the cloud. We assess your needs, thoroughly document the network design, and then implement and manage the solution. With our assistance, you can upgrade your network and become ready to leverage all the benefits of the cloud.
