Most companies utilize best-of-breed services from multiple cloud providers while still maintaining the intercloud silos.
Most companies utilize best-of-breed services from multiple cloud providers while still maintaining the intercloud silos. That’s essentially underutilizing multi-cloud's potential. To maximize multi-cloud’s flexibility and cost effectiveness, you need an interconnected multi-cloud fabric, allowing seamless data interoperability and communication between apps and services hosted across multiple clouds. In addition to connecting to-the-cloud, you need networking in the cloud. Most multi-cloud deployments fail to reach their true potential simply because of inefficient multi-cloud networking.
Single region, single cloud connectivity is easy, but as multi-cloud becomes a business imperative, ubiquitous connectivity becomes a challenge. Technically, a multi-cloud could mean utilizing services from different providers. For instance, a multi-cloud organization can use GCP for its analytics capabilities while running generative AI initiatives on Azure. In such set-ups, cross-cloud integration and communication may not be a concern.
But now, organizations are increasingly experimenting with their multi-cloud environments to boost efficiency and maximize ROI. Instead of running different apps in different environments, they are hosting different parts of the same application on different cloud platforms. They may host their data on GCP while their compute workloads run on Azure. Such set-ups require continuous data transfers between the different cloud environments, necessitating robust intercloud connectivity.
Without this connectivity, your organization may be using more than one cloud, but you can’t:
Manage data residency by storing and processing specific data in specific regions across multiple clouds
Scale your resources across multiple clouds as and when needed
Share data and collaborate across multiple clouds for creating an end-to-end, cross-cloud toolchain
In short, the multi-vendor components and services in your multi-cloud environment will not work synergistically to augment individual benefits.
However, intercloud connectivity can be challenging. While most CSPs offer managed direct physical connections to their data centers, their cloud on-ramp solutions do not include comprehensive multi-cloud connectivity across all providers. Since each provider's infrastructure operates differently, network complexity grows as you add more regions and providers to your multi-cloud fabric.
So, how do you ensure reliable, high-performance, and secure multi-cloud connectivity?
Organizations have several options when it comes to multi-cloud or intercloud connectivity. Each option differs in its ease-of-deployment, security, performance, and limitations. Below is an overview of all:
The easiest, most readily available intercloud connectivity option is via the open internet. You don’t need any setup or configurations. Organizations can simply buy an internet service from an ISP that already offers connectivity to all the clouds that constitute their multi-cloud environment.
On the downside, the corporate traffic becomes vulnerable to all the inherent security risks of the public internet. In addition, latency and bandwidth of the public internet are never predictable. You receive performance and quality of service (QoS) as part of a best-effort approach, rather than having guaranteed SLAs.
Going a step further, organizations can add security to their internet-based multi-cloud connectivity by using site-to-site VPN services. This does not require any additional hardware either. You can tap into each cloud provider's VPN service and establish encrypted connectivity between them over the public internet. This method also masks the internal IP addresses of the corporate network or nodes, making all data transfers immune to cyberattacks like man-in-the-middle (MitM) and distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
However, since VPN tunnels still use the public internet, the latency and bandwidth issues persist, and there are no guaranteed SLAs. Requirements and configuration for VPN services may vary across CSPs. This can add to the complexity and management overhead as you add more cloud environments to your multi-cloud.
Organizations can bypass the internet in favor of direct connections with higher bandwidth and reliability. These connections are dedicated and private, offering better security and predictable latency. Since it’s near impossible for an organization to establish a physical networking backbone between all the regions across multiple clouds, they often partner with datacenter operators that already have direct connectivity to major CSPs.
However, this solution requires you to colocate within the data center facility inorder to access its multi-cloud networking fabric. You can do so via a virtual router service or through a dedicated physical router. In any case, your organization will be responsible for managing billing and SLAs across multiple CSPs as well as the colocation facility.
Some CSPs, such as Microsoft Azure and Oracle, have partnered up to skip the intermediary colocation provider. But such solutions considerably limit your options, as integrating a non-partner CSP in your multi-cloud environment will require custom configuration, scripts, and/or third-party tools.
A more holistic alternative for multi-cloud connectivity is to utilize a fully managed third-party multi-cloud networking backbone. The emma multi-cloud management platform has its own multi-cloud networking backbone, which is essentially a network of high-bandwidth, low-latency physical connections between different cloud providers. Unlike typical colocation, organizations are not responsible for managing any of the hardware or software aspects of networking and can manage billing and SLAs across all CSPs via a centralized dashboard.
On one hand, emma’s multi-cloud networking backbone provides robust cloud-to-cloud connectivity, allowing your data to flow seamlessly and securely between different cloud environments. On the other hand, the emma platform abstracts each cloud’s underlying services and technologies to provide consistent networking capabilities across all CSPs in your multi-cloud environment. You can select the type of multi-cloud network you need through the platform’s intuitive and user-friendly visual dashboard in a matter of minutes, all the while saving three times more than using your own or a provider’s network.
Here’s how your organization can benefit from emma’s networking backbone:
A single, global infrastructure for seamless connectivity across CSPs and datacenters, without the complexities of managing disparate networks.
emma’s networking backbone boasts high-speed, low-latency connections for better response times and application performance for end users.
It incorporates built-in redundancy and fault-tolerance for continuous connectivity and minimal disruptions and downtime.
The private backbone optimizes data transfers between CSPs through direct connections and peering agreements for predictable and reduced data egress costs.
It offers robust security measures, including encryption, firewall protection, and access controls.
You can easily scale resources up or down or redistribute workloads across different clouds in response to changing requirements.
The emma platform provides real-time insights into network performance, SLAs, usage, billing, and potential bottlenecks for managing network configurations and troubleshooting, all via a centralized dashboard.
The emma — enterprise multi-cloud management application — platform is every enterprise’s one-stop shop for multi-cloud connectivity and management. Collectively, the emma platform along with its networking backbone enables organizations to harness the full potential of their multi-cloud environments through robust intercloud connectivity, centralized resource and cost management, and seamless cross-cloud app and data integrations. As we say at emma, more cloud less complexity!
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