This year has been a wakeup call for many organizations — a reminder that their systems cannot be “just good enough” because the bar can move at any time. For this reason, many organizations are rethinking their networking strategy. The need for a more robust and ultimately resilient system that can stand up to the demands of a partially or potentially fully remote workforce is more apparent than ever.
Many companies have already started the process of exploring the cloud for elements of their workloads. In fact, 90% of enterprises have started the implementation process in some form, but only 40% of their total workloads are being processed or managed in the cloud, let alone using cloud-based technologies to manage their network traffic.
The financial impact is real, though, with 74% of CFOs in technology companies saying that cloud computing has had a measurable impact on their organizations, and 66% of executives across industries saying that a multi-cloud strategy is imperative to reducing costs.
But there are some barriers to realizing these gains, and such barriers can not only slow innovation and hinder competitiveness, but they can also create significant issues related to productivity and performance in a hybrid or fully remote workforce. Let’s take a closer look at the role of cloud networking in these situations and how many organizations are overcoming these barriers.
Consolidating and Eliminating Common Risk Points
One of the major issues that enterprises face is network security. In fact, 41% of companies reported some kind of cybersecurity breach or attempt according to a recent IDG survey of US organizations. It’s imperative that traffic is fully secured and the organization has visibility into network traffic. Cloud networking addresses this by:
- Automating security notifications
- Centralizing network security upgrades and patching
- Providing general awareness of existing and new security vulnerabilities
By implementing a single point of management for your network, your security team can better manage risk without significantly impacting user experience, ensuring a better overall level of access for all employees. Some of the common ways in which this is addressed include:
Single-Sign-On (SSO) Support
Using a combination of single-sign-on, which eliminates the need to manage multiple passwords and enables employees to better follow the security guidelines that your security team needs in place, and multi-factor authentication, IT can control access from any location seamlessly. Combined with greater monitoring of the network, this ensures more robust protection against unauthorized access, and a more streamlined approach to security both on-premises and in the cloud.
Centralized Access Management
By consolidating platforms, businesses are able to leverage a single, easy-to-use security interface for all of their devices instead of dozens of different interfaces and potential vulnerabilities. That centralization ensures a much greater level of visibility to identify potential threats and respond to attempts to infiltrate your systems and accounts.
By ensuring predictable vulnerability management results and increased scalability with automated upgrades and patching, cloud networking provides enterprise organizations with a consolidated platform with mature security features that streamline operations.
Enhance Performance and Solidify Reliability
Through cloud networking, organizations are able to fully optimize and integrate into existing systems their cloud platform. According to a recent IDG survey, 71% of enterprise businesses are looking for speed improvements, 63% want greater flexibility, and 57% are eager for improved customer support and visibility internally. This means more efficient use of bandwidth and prioritization of critical applications wherever they are used.
Traditional networking is not designed for this. The volume of traffic passing over these older networks is far beyond what was envisioned 20 or even 10 years ago, and the distribution of data across local, cloud and SaaS tools makes it difficult to manage effectively. Cloud networking introduces a more robust cloud- or hybrid-driven approach to your network. By offloading low-risk traffic to the public Internet and consolidating all access points, performance can be greatly improved. This means:
- Better Load Balancing — With the right combination of technology and cloud-based tools, it is possible to better balance bandwidth and traffic. If a service fails, this allows you to quickly re-balance traffic and keep your employees productive, none-the-wiser that a problem has occurred. This can even be effective in the event of an attack on your network.
- Build and Leverage Reliable Data Routes — By centralizing all connection types and leveraging the cloud to manage traffic, you can build more reliable data routes for key traffic, ensuring mission-critical applications always run at peak performance.
- Leverage Public Clouds to Boost Performance — The WAN can be extended to multiple public clouds — such as AWS, Azure, or GCP — seamlessly, leading to greater optimization; providing better user experience.
- Improve Legacy WAN Integration — For those with hybrid or multi-cloud solutions, legacy WAN components can be augmented to enhance performance in branches. This will be especially important as many organizations shift to a hybrid work arrangement in 2021.
One of the major barriers to cloud adoption is the performance gaps that can develop in a traditional system. Cloud networking addresses this directly. Because MPLS services are largely offloaded for less sensitive traffic, costs are reduced with the use of broadband solutions that are more economical without impacting performance. The ultimate result is that a business’s network is more resilient and has greater productivity because there is a lower risk of a network interruption.
Download the full ebook today to learn how cloud networking technology can improve operations throughout your organization: https://info.bedroc.com/cloud-networking-future
This post was originally posted on the following site: https://info.bedroc.com/cloud-networking-future
