As organizations across the globe rush to take advantage of everything the cloud has to offer, most are moving beyond hybrid cloud environments to multicloud architectures across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, IBM, Google, and others, as an increasing percentage of IT infrastructure is being virtualized.
At the same time, cloud environments are gaining in popularity with the growth of XaaS, or everything-as-a-service, where IT teams often serve as “cloud brokers”, helping business units determine the best deployment and management models for different business applications including CRM, ERP, HR systems, collaboration platforms, e-commerce, web, and mobile applications.
Whether driven by digital transformation, everything-as-a-service, or both; it is clear that the cloud is here to stay. According to the 2017 CloudEndure Cloud Migration Survey Report, use of the public cloud among companies surveyed will increase by 28% year-over-year in the next two years, with 29% of production workloads living with Amazon Web Services.
The AWS Connectivity Conundrum
While organizations of all shapes and sizes take advantage of Amazon Web Services, secure, performant connectivity between the edge and the AWS presence is expensive an inagile at worst, and cumbersome at best. Direct Connect is a great way to leverage MPLS to solve the Amazon Web Services connectivity conundrum, but MPLS links are pricey, carrier-constrained, and cumbersome to optimize. Not to mention, in most cases, you’re stuck extending your own MPLS network to make it all happen.
The decentralization of endpoints driven by digital transformation, mobility, cloud adoption, and IoT are increasingly pushing organizations onto the Internet to connect core business services, even Google’s pledged to go “Internet only”, so on the surface, it makes sense to extend VPNs over the Internet to AWS for connectivity as a viable alternative to the expense and constraints of MPLS extension. However, concurrent VPN connections are very limited, they become exponentially more complex to manage as their numbers increase, and you always pay a big price in performance for the security gains they bring to the table.
Elevate Your Network
NetFoundry eases your AWS connectivity woes by enabling instant creation of software-only cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-edge private networks over existing Internet circuits.
Our self-service platform is delivered as a suite of hardened services, standalone client drivers, and a user-friendly console with statuses and metrics. Use the web-based orchestration console to define your AppWANs, which are a logical abstraction of the underlying network in much the same way that containers and virtual machines abstract applications from underlying compute infrastructure. Our customers quickly and easily spin up highly secure, performant, application-specific networks at scale, where application contexts define the networking which connects them.
The components within our orchestration console were designed to make building and augmenting AppWANs that connect to Amazon Web Services and its ancillary services easy and seamless. For example, an API integration between Amazon Web Services’ PrivateLink and NetFoundry could enable customers to enjoy the benefits of PrivateLink when communicating intra-AWS while seamlessly enjoying the same benefits when connecting to other cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Bluemix, their own private data centers, and even IoT deployments. For SaaS or Unified Communications providers in, NetFoundry’s AWS gateway could connect AppWANs that can provide your customers with security and performance, especially for latency-sensitive apps.
Amazon Web Services connected AppWANs make stubborn, legacy applications cloud-portable with a layered security architecture that isolates and protects data flows through a data stream fragmentation (aggregation and disaggregation) and military-grade encryption. The result is a private, dark, zero-trust network, protecting you and your customers from edge-to-edge.
Unlike traditional VPN solutions, AWS connected AppWANs automatically adapt to network conditions and route traffic via the best performing paths and transport protocol. For example, the platform may encapsulate TCP in the inherently more performant UDP and thereby dramatically outperform traditional single-path VPNs in terms of throughput and latency.
