As solution providers and system integrators deploy cloud infrastructure and operating models in their enterprise customers, the role that networking plays and the impact of these models on enterprise networks is ever increasing today. There is growing importance of the network to cloud computing, why the network must change, and what SIs must do to lead these changes.
Network Is Critical to Cloud Computing
When it comes to enterprise IT deployments today, Cloud computing is quite a central model now and it is a model in which IT resources and services are abstracted from the underlying infrastructure and provided on demand and at scale in a multi-tenant environment.
From a pure play networking standpoint, each service model requires the cloud provider to expose more or less of the network and provide more or fewer networking capabilities to cloud users. Conversely, each service model requires cloud users to understand and design more or less of the network to which they are exposed. The network is most exposed in the IaaS model and least in the SaaS model.
When we look deeply, the essential technological difference between the deployment models is derived from the networking relationship between the cloud user and the cloud provider. In a private cloud, the user and provider are within the same trusted network boundary.
On the other hand, in a public cloud scenario, they are on different networks. In a hybrid cloud, a secured connection may exist between the user’s and provider’s networks, or the user’s network may extend into the provider’s cloud. In a community cloud, the structure depends on the charter and architecture of the organizations operating the cloud.
Most importantly, it must be noted that every cloud is some combination of a service and deployment model. Regardless of the type of cloud, however, one fact remains true: no network simply means no cloud. Without networks, users cannot access their cloud services. Without networks, applications, data, and users cannot move between clouds. Without networks, the infrastructure components that must work together to create a cloud cannot.
Welcome to Cloud Era, Changing face of Networking
Networking must change to embrace next generation capabilities, because the rise of cloud models is changing what is happening on the network:
- New infrastructure: For example, everything is becoming virtualized, infrastructure is becoming programmable, and servers and applications have mobility
- New applications: For example, data-intensive analytics, parallel and clustered processing, telemedicine, remote experts, and community cloud services
- New access: For example, mobile device-based access to everything and virtual desktops
- New traffic: For example, predominantly server-to-server traffic patterns and location-independent endpoints on both sides of a service or transaction
However, it is important to note that data is still quite central and always at the helm which needs to travel between the computing and storage components of an application and then to the user of the application. Security still must be applied to help make sure that the right users, devices, and systems have access to the right data at the right time while protecting against attacks, intrusions, breaches, and leaks.
Different kinds of data and traffic have different levels of importance and network resource needs that still must be met across the entire network with quality-of-service (QoS) capabilities.
However, how you do these things has to change:
- In Cloud and virtualization era, network architecture needs to be flexible, instead of being a static stumbling block
- Network services need to be location independent: delivered wherever data, applications, and users are and whenever the services are needed
- Network resources need to be abstracted so that provisioning can be automated and actions orchestrated through common interfaces
Network Flexibility
Also, it must be noted that there is no single, fundamental architecture or design pattern that will satisfy the requirements of all cloud models, all applications, all users, or all of customers. Through the breadth and depth of its innovations, SIs must make sure that there is a solution for every use and that there is the correct mix of products and capabilities so that their customers’ investment is protected for the longest term possible.
Networking Integration
Integration is needed both out from and in to the network. SIs are in ideal position today to creating a fabric that presents diverse systems’ capabilities as part of an integrated infrastructure, as a cloud, with networking as the fundamental platform:
- A single network for all data and traffic in the cloud: one set of devices, one cable plant, and one management system
- Security and encryption for every kind of traffic and data, controlled and implemented through the network
- Advanced networking capabilities delivered deep into the servers and virtualization platforms running the cloud infrastructure (Figure 4)
Conclusion
As network evolves with the introduction of cloud and virtualization – the implementation of the Internet of Things (IoT) is leading to rapid innovation and business opportunity, along with new challenges for IT leaders as well. This is also opening up new opportunities for the solution providers.
And as a result, more often than ever, technology partners are connecting private, public, open, and hybrid clouds with the globally connected network of clouds.