From your experience, what are the challenges which WAN managers under-estimate when redesigning their network infrastructure to connect to cloud providers?
WAN managers under-estimate the essential role connectivity plays to the overall experience of using the public cloud. Placing workloads into the cloud still requires diverse and resilient ways to import and export data to and from the Cloud.
Many times, cloud connectivity is an afterthought for organisations, only to realise their network infrastructure does not support their needs and ambitions. For example, trying to execute critical activities over the public internet without QoS guarantees can adversely impact performance. The solutions should run on a dedicated backbone that connects directly to the public cloud ecosystem to truly put cloud connectivity in the core of a WAN.
What advice would you give WAN managers from a security point of view when moving sensitive data and mission-critical applications into the cloud?
Always remember the general rule of thumb - the cloud provider is responsible for the security of the cloud while organisations are responsible for securing everything in the cloud.
The security perimeter is complex with hybrid environments and requires a network design that will need to consider how data is stored, accessed and used.
WAN managers need connectivity options to route traffic appropriate to the sensitivity of the data. They should evaluate how much exposure workloads have to the public internet and consider using private and dedicated connections to the cloud as an added layer of security.
How does Telia Carrier Cloud Connect address cloud connectivity challenges today?
Our goal is to provide customers with the best cloud network foundation with a multitude of benefits. We help our customers steer towards a more stable network experience between their on-prem and cloud infrastructure; boost their network agility and add a strong layer of security.
We know that many WAN managers face accelerating demands on bandwidth usage and building around the needs of organisational users such as DevOps which require more flexible and scalable options to order bandwidth when needed.
We offer all of this and more, with no constraints on capacity and geographical reach as Cloud Connect runs on our global backbone with direct connections to the most demanded Cloud Service Providers and SaaS providers. Our commercial model is flexible, simple & predictable. Customers can mix and match Cloud Connect with Ethernet and Internet over the same port. They can also order and or manage their service on our intuitive “My Carrier” portal.
Can you share a successful case story with us?
We helped the French gaming company Ankama, famous for the online game DOFUS, to effortlessly migrate most of their infrastructure and production capabilities to AWS.
With more than 85 million users worldwide, Ankama needed a secure and reliable network environment while in the transition to AWS to build a cloud production platform.
Using Cloud Connect, we connected them directly to AWS with a private connection bypassing the public internet. This dedicated bandwidth and a low latency, resilient connection helped Ankama reinvent itself as a cloud-native gaming company.
What do you think will be the next big thing to challenge how enterprises design their networks?
The widespread deployment of SaaS applications and the dependency on cloud tools requires WAN design principles to address application performance.
WAN managers must understand how a network design will influence application performance as well as adapting to unpredictable and varying traffic patterns. More application-aware tools and services will need to be deployed and aligned with solid network performance.
