To effectively serve their employees and customers, enterprises rely heavily on cloud-delivered applications. Many organizations custom-select cloud services for specific functions of their business. Traditional wide area networks (WANs) are insufficient to support multi-cloud architectures without requiring significant updates to existing infrastructure. Complexities can occur when connecting workloads deployed on multiple clouds through the data center. The quality of experience and application performance for the end user primarily depends on the quality of the network connecting users to applications deployed on- or off-cloud. To avoid network issues, organizations need effective multi-cloud solutions.
A Robust Multi-Cloud Strategy
Building a comprehensive cloud migration strategy is critical. A multi-cloud solution provides businesses with an integrated environment to migrate workloads among multiple public, hybrid or private clouds. This helps companies benefit from best-of-breed services, compliance, and disaster recovery, and avoid vendor lock-in.
Cloud service providers try to optimize the localization and delivery of their services by distributing service tenants scaled out across locations worldwide. However, the application performance and quality of user experience mostly depends on network efficiency – how users connect to these cloud-based applications.
As more applications move to the cloud, the traditional approach of backhauling traffic over dedicated circuits to a centralized Internet gateway via a hub-and-spoke architecture becomes less relevant. It is expensive and introduces unnecessary latency that affects user experience.
SD-WAN Connects Users and Apps Quickly and Securely
To transition to the cloud and get users connected to their apps faster, enterprise network architects are reevaluating traditional WAN architectures. They’re looking for ways to route Internet traffic locally, and to take advantage of inexpensive broadband Internet services. These experts are increasingly turning to Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN).
SD-WAN can solve a wide range of network management and security needs. Enterprises can implement consistent management and security policies based on user, device, or application requirements across LANs and WANs to ultimately achieve a better overall application experience.
One SD-WAN benefit over traditional WANs is visibility. Network administrators are able to manage and orchestrate the network centrally, monitoring traffic for inconsistencies. Application-level visibility provides details on which applications are using bandwidth, how much resources they are using, and how well they are performing.
Device-level visibility allows security policies to become much more granular. Comprehensive security options for enterprises embracing the cloud and SaaS are a feature of secure access service edge (SASE) SD-WAN platforms.
Using the Right SD-WAN Solution
SD-WAN solutions provide immense benefits to organizations including lower cost, improved management, and better application delivery. Transitioning to SD-WAN can seem overwhelming, but it is not complex.
Cloud-delivered VMware SD-WAN™ by VeloCloud® was designed with simplicity as the main goal—without sacrificing security, flexibility, or speed. VMware delivers high-performance, reliable branch access to cloud services, private data centers, and SaaS-based enterprise applications.
On Thursday, August 27th, join our “Strengthen your Multicloud Strategy with SD-WAN” webinar. You will learn more about how VMware delivers optimal performance for applications no matter where they are deployed, without compromising payload security.
