Cloud WAN Architecture: Cloud Era enterprises need to rethink the network

The public cloud service has subverted the traditional practice of establishing a wide area network (WAN), and engineers should respond. Andre Kindness, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, says companies have invested a lot of money into cloud services, especially software as a service (SaaS), but they have not invested in a network architecture upgrade to provide an acceptable performance and user experience. According to a Forrester study sponsored by Juniper Networks and XO communications, while companies have deployed public cloud services, they are not paying attention to network upgrades. The study surveyed 154 companies, and over the past three years, network upgrades and updates ranked sixth in it enterprise priorities, and only 47% per cent said they had invested in it. In the absence of network spending, we see cloud deployments increasing and cloud deployments requiring new network approaches. "This is because the network team is not synchronized with the infrastructure and operations team," "and," kindness says, "people treat networks like old phones, thinking they can be picked up, they think the web is there, and if they need it, they just need to put in more bandwidth and the network will work." "CIOs will gradually realize that increasing the bandwidth of cloud services is not a solution. They will find that they need a new cloud WAN architecture, and eventually the network team will be pulled into the queue. Forrester asks businesses what they are doing now to support their cloud strategy. The most common answer is network upgrades (47%). Meanwhile, 33% of respondents said they were evaluating their WAN services. The most common investment since the enterprise started using cloud services is to increase the number of WAN bandwidth or links (47%) and new security Services (46%). Only 22% of companies say they haven't made any changes to support cloud computing. "It made me realize that we need to bring their networks into the cloud," said Stephen Collen, vice president of corporate marketing at Juniper Network. "It's only when cloud computing and network strategy are in place that we can play the edge of cloud computing." "Cloud WAN Architecture: direct access to services from anywhere" when it comes to cloud computing, you can't just buy new servers with more bandwidth, "kindness says." The entire architecture has changed. "Whether they rely on the old radial WAN architecture or a more modern multiprotocol label switching network, many companies still route web traffic through the data center-including traffic related to cloud services." However, this traffic transfer brings too much overhead to cloud services. In a branch office 1000 km from the company's data center, the network architecture routes salesforce.com traffic through remote data centers, which can lead to latency, which will undoubtedly affect the work of branch sales people. A distributed enterprise needs a cloud WAN architecture to provide users with direct access to the cloud resources. Direct Internet access will force many IT companiesIndustry to invest in new infrastructure for remote offices. "You'll start to see a double or triple type link in each branch," kindness says. "You have to have a grid because you won't send all traffic back to one location." You must have 4-7-tier network services and security, firewalls need to be everywhere. You also need a global load balancer because you want the user to connect to the nearest resource. Users using SaaS and PAAs need to connect to cloud computing to make changes. The location of the data needs to change and the architecture needs to change. "In the cloud era, businesses need to not only change the way they structure the WAN, they must also optimize the network accordingly." WAN optimization vendors traditionally focus on two key areas: traffic between data centers and traffic from data centers to branch offices. As the wide area network develops to support mobility and cloud computing, these vendors are beginning to focus on the user experience, whether the user is at the corporate headquarters, branch offices, home offices, or outside. The TRAC Institute found that the quality of end-user experience was a new and important issue for WAN management. The new TRAC report, WAN management spectrum, found that in more than 400 of the respondents, 46% of the companies found the end-user experience quality as the most important performance metric for the WAN, or even more than throughput, data backup speed, and application availability. Bojan Simic, the Trac founder and chief analyst, said the end-user experience was once the least important WAN performance metric, but its importance has increased dramatically over the past 18 months. "More traffic is being shifted to the public Internet, and more and more applications are starting on the Web." If you look at cloud computing, you may find that apps are not necessarily cloud-based, but more and more applications are starting to rely on cloud computing components within applications, such as social media advertising, "Simic says." All of these things are pooled in the browser. "CIOs do a lot of different things to improve their competitiveness and save money," says Dave White, president of the WAN performance provider Ipanema Technologies Inc., "because of the wide deployment of cloud applications and the Internet, it provides a huge ROI , but they need to manage it. "White says companies have invested in more and more network resources, but users are still experiencing application problems." Businesses need to get rid of the idea that they need to do something to install larger network channels and optimize the flow of existing channels. Instead, they need to more closely manage the applications in the network. Many vendors are working to broaden their expertise and combine optimization and acceleration as well as visualization and control. But they also need to think about how cloud computing will change the network and application architecture. "We think the application is now an executable on a virtual machine," says Forrester's kindness. "They may also mention two or three tier applications, but when you move to cloud computing, developers change the way they developWay. When you move to Amazon Cloud computing services, you need to create an application that can be transferred when the server is down. The application executable program is divided into multiple files on multiple servers, and when one fails, the other is enabled and remains running. Think about how these apps work now. It changes the way the network works, whether on a LAN or across a LAN. You have more traffic, but it will be smaller and more dispersed. "Network teams will need to structure, optimize, and manage their networks to accommodate these new cloud computing applications." They will also need to communicate more with the application team. "The network team can't just optimize it," he says. "They need to change the WAN." ”