Moving to IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect is mission critical for enterprises

As cloud adoption continues to evolve, enabling agile, effective, performant and cost-efficient multi-cloud connectivity globally has become mission critical for enterprises. In this article, Hon Kit Lam, Vice President of Hybrid Connectivity Services at Tata Communications, explores this evolving cloud adoption and why moving to IZO™ Multi Cloud is mission critical for enterprises.

In today’s world, almost all enterprises have more than one cloud provider, with more data than ever going to the cloud, particularly given the rise of work from anywhere and ubiquitous customer access. Research shows that more than 80% of enterprises now have more than one cloud provider.

Having multiple cloud providers has many benefits, helping enterprises avoid vendor lock-in, manage risk and enhance the resilience of their operations. It also gives enterprises the flexibility to choose the best-suited services for their specific needs to optimise performance, while for global enterprises, using multiple providers allows them to distribute their applications and data across different locations, ensuring better redundancy and disaster recovery capabilities.

However, using multiple cloud providers presents several challenges like higher costs, and increased complexity when it comes to integration, with each cloud platform typically having its own unique interfaces, APIs, security protocols and management tools. Meanwhile, ensuring seamless data integration and interoperability across different cloud environments can be a significant challenge. While multi cloud can potentially offer cost optimisation opportunities, it also leads to increased complexities in tracking and managing costs across different providers.

In addition, enterprises using traditional network architecture for their cloud platforms are likely to run into performance challenges, since paths are not optimised to offer the requisite performance and reliability. While those using internet VPNs will also encounter difficulties, as internet VPNs typically provide limited site-to-site bandwidth, unpredictable performance, and high cloud egress costs.

Mission critical applications moving to the cloud

Mission critical applications are moving to the cloud, leading to higher demand from enterprises for multi cloud connectivity services. For example, the number of enterprises globally using software-defined cloud interconnects (SDCI) is expected to grow to 30% by 2024, up from 10% in 2020. A Gartner research report confirms this trend, estimating that enterprise spending on private connections to the cloud will reach 3.6 billion US dollars by 2026.

This makes security and performance a vital element for enterprises when it comes to multi cloud connectivity. However, there are several challenges with traditional cloud connect services, such as complexity in managing multi cloud connectivity, as well as a lack of traffic visibility, flexibility and agility.

Many enterprises are still undergoing their cloud journey and trying to navigate these challenges. Tata Communications has addressed this issue head on, offering a reliable, on-demand solution with reduction in TCO related to cloud networking.

“IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect, a software defined solution connects an enterprises’ data centres, branches, public clouds, private cloud and third-party network on-demand, providing customers with greater agility to connect their users, branches, data centres, clouds and partners across the globe.”

As a one-stop shop and end-to-end solution for enterprises, it provides on-demand, real-time, reliable and scalable multi cloud connectivity, making Tata Communications one of only a few companies in the global telecom industry capable of such a solution.

Designed to address the current challenges in the market, IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect is a PaaS-based service built on virtual connection and virtual network functions. This removes the complexity of sourcing and managing connections and hardware, providing enterprise customers with greater agility to connect everything globally, all one from a single provider.

Customers benefit from streamlined management and improved flexibility, and at the same time IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect also enables end-to-end predictable performance from branch to cloud, improving application performance and response time.

IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect also reduces egress cost by using dedicated connections from edge, leading to around 25% cost savings. It also provides a single pane of glass view to enable complete visibility into the network architecture for greater control and agility. It also leverages deterministic routing to ensure that performance is never compromised.

As the world rapidly moves towards internet-based and cloud-based infrastructure with mission-critical applications hosted on multiple clouds, enterprises are increasingly using multiple cloud providers for their applications. Therefore, having a solution which makes connecting to any cloud seamless – with performance and security at the heart of it – has become mission critical for enterprises.

To find out more about Tata Communications new IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect solution, click here.