Offering your cloud the edge it needs

In the modern business landscape, it’s essential for organisations to store the large amounts of data they generate in a secure and reliable manner. In this blog post, Tata Communications’ Song Toh, VP – Global Network Services, introduces a new multi-cloud networking platform set to deliver many operational benefits to enterprises.

As enterprises seek agility and modernise their IT infrastructure platform, many have chosen to migrate their applications and business workloads from corporate data centres to the cloud. 

In their cloud migration journey, a significant number of enterprises chose to distribute their workload across more than one public cloud provider. It is also true that many enterprises have retained some data stores or applications in their in-house data centres for privacy, compliance or other reasons. This has resulted in a hybrid IT environment that spans across private, public and hybrid clouds.

The emergence of this complex architecture has created a need for enterprises to ensure their users can connect to business applications, regardless of where they are hosted, as if they were all sitting under one roof. This need has created a special demand on the “edge” of the network.

Enterprises can connect users on their WAN to individual public cloud providers using established methodologies such as Direct Connect or ExpressRoute. However, as more and more enterprises deploy applications in more than one cloud, this traditional approach runs into resilience and cost challenges. In addition, running applications across multiple clouds may pose security and compliance risks.  Insight and visibility of applications traffic on hybrid clouds is very important to deliver application reliably and securely.

“There is a need for a flexible network connectivity platform to connect distributed apps, which may be distributed across geographies or across multiple clouds.”

We at Tata Communications are building a multi-cloud network platform – IZO™ Cloud Edge, that provides both advanced networking and security services as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs).  These services will be situated at the edge of our network, and operate on traffic to multiple clouds. IZO™ Cloud Edge is a unified, abstracted multi-cloud networking platform that will delivers many operational benefits to enterprises including visibility, security, redundancy and application reliability.

“One of the many challenges enterprises face today is integrating cloud resources to their legacy networks, which are neither scalable nor flexible. With IZO™ Cloud Edge, enterprises can now deploy cloud gateways with advanced networking and security resources on-demand. “

Such a service enables them to connect their users to applications across multiple clouds using an agile network architecture. This will enable them to optimise multi-cloud application performance, policy management and ensure security.

Other use-cases supported include cloud-to-cloud routing both within a region or across regions, end-user to cloud connectivity and on-premise corporate data centre to cloud connectivity for data migration.

Tata Communications is launching its IZO™ Cloud Edge platform in Singapore and Amsterdam, with further expansions imminently to London, Paris, San Jose, Dallas, Chicago, Ashburn, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

“Our goal is to make it easy for enterprises to extend and deploy their networking resources to improve application performance, expand into new markets and avoid the delay of procuring and building expensive network nodes.”

With Tata Communications, all of this is available as a managed service through a catalogue of VNFs including SD-WAN, routing and security, delivering policy management, visibility and insights from the user to the cloud.

With our global reach and a unified multi-cloud networking platform, it is now very simple to turn on resources whenever and wherever needed, at the edge.

Discover more about how businesses can implement a fully secure multi-cloud strategy.