Moving applications and services to the cloud is one of the most effective strategies enterprises can adopt in their efforts to achieve three strategic objectives: increase productivity, operate more efficiently and reduce costs.
However, placing their applications and services in the cloud is not enough, in and of itself, to achieve these objectives. Because employees at every location must have secure, reliable and flexible access to the applications now residing in the cloud, enterprises also need network connectivity with the cloud.
Although some enterprises use the public internet to obtain that connectivity, IT executives should not rely on this best-effort network to support their mission-critical business operations. Its inability to guarantee data delivery, quality of service or service priorities, along with its lack of service-level agreements (SLAs), calls for a more effective, reliable cloud-networking solution.
Many enterprises are turning to a private-network approach, one specifically designed to deliver cost-effective reliability, security and performance. Comprising Ethernet and MPLS-based IP-VPNs and backed by strong SLAs, a private network solution delivers carrier-grade performance to support the mission-critical applications enterprises use daily.
Yet because all networks are not created equal, a cloud solution is only as good as the network that supports it. Therefore, IT executives want a network that can adapt to the unique requirements of the individual enterprise and offer:
• burstable scalability for each enterprise location, with no need to pay for idle capacity
• transparent support for all network-access technologies that exist across the entire enterprise, thus allowing the enterprise to leverage its existing hardware and software investments
• rapid provisioning – in hours and days, rather than weeks and months – of new connections and fast turn-up of new services
• geographic reach from any enterprise location to any desired end-point in the world
• reliable, secure transport of data between all enterprise locations and the cloud
• all these capabilities for a price that does not constrain their capex and opex budgets.
By engaging with a network provider that has built a multi-layer network, with a Layer-2 Ethernet-over-MPLS architecture and a Layer-3 IP architecture, IT executives can satisfy all their requirements and be confident they will achieve their cloud-computing objectives.