Thirty years ago, in an overcrowded airport in Puerto Rico, a budding entrepreneur found himself stranded along with hundreds of other fellow passengers attempting to reach the British Virgin Islands. Surrounded by chaos, he looked up at the clouds and considered a different approach.
He chartered a plane, borrowed a blackboard at the airport and held up the message “Virgin Airlines. $39 one way to BVI” to his soon-to-be passengers.
That man was Richard Branson who went on to launch Virgin Atlantic, one of the most progressive and visionary companies of our time.
In today’s IT environment, when faced with network chaos, IT would do well to take a page from Branson’s book. The challenge is to approach problems in a new way that lets you resolve and issue by turning to the clouds and not by looking at the chaos around you.
Cloud computing has dramatically changed the way we do business and the way we work. It also has created a slew of challenges. Today’s enterprises are faced with multiple clouds, applications and devices that require immediate, high-performing, and secure access that can’t be addressed with traditional WAN trouble-shooting.
According to industry analyst firm IDC, by 2020, 67% of infrastructure and software spend will be for cloud services. Enterprises have realized that the simple and cost-effective route to cloud computing can be achieved with the help of industry giants such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. After all, why build cloud infrastructure yourself, if it can be built and managed by someone else?
The reality is, however, that once in the cloud, applications and services are no longer tied to the companies’ existing infrastructure. In addition to major performance issues, this can prove devastating for data security.
Highly-publicized data breaches can be destructive for all types of companies ranging from budding startups to large government institutions. Just this year, data from as many as 3.5 million Los Angeles County residents was found on an AWS S3 instance. According to Govetech.com, the data consisted of at least 396,000 contact emails and 33,000 social security numbers. And parents were distraught when in late May a teen phone monitoring app leaked thousands of user passwords, Apple ID email addresses and plaintext passwords. Simply unthinkable to see this kind of information in the hands of cyber-criminals.
While trying to balance the performance and security requirements of their organizations’ cloud applications and services, IT departments find themselves in a permanent fight they simply cannot win. Meanwhile, more security and network performance technologies are being deployed from the data center in an effort to solve the cloud access management problem, with little success. Solutions like SD-WAN are built to support connecting users to applications, but they only land you at the cloud’s doorstop. You need to get further inside the cloud infrastructure and applications to really address the problem.
By following Branson’s approach and looking at the problem another way, might present the solution.
What if you could spin up a dedicated, secure and high-performance network for every hosted cloud application? Within minutes you could replace complex, unstable VPNs, with a cloud-centric, on-demand network that can be launched, viewed and managed through a single pane of glass. Security, performance and business agility is delivered to you. And you can focus on what really matters: customer satisfaction, performance and security – and growing your business.
NetFoundry is pioneering this new approach to cloud connectivity. The future is bright. Check us out.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
– Albert Einstein
