Why network connectivity is key to successfully running your modern multicloud

Most businesses are now using multiple clouds, across a variety of flavors: SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, public and private, as well as legacy on-premises infrastructure. But few of them arrived in that situation by design. They didn’t set out to have such a mixture, but business needs drove them into it.

Despite the hyperscalers’ efforts to help these businesses out of that morass and onto their platforms, most businesses don’t want to put all their eggs in one basket. Or they’ve determined that certain applications need to head in one cloud direction, whilst others go in another.

So hybrid multicloud is most likely the ongoing future for businesses today, as well as the need to optimize it all. And that’s where network connectivity comes into play.

The current state of enterprise private networks

The enterprise private network has long been the backbone of many large businesses. For 40+ years, it has provided the glue that binds an organization’s distributed, global operations together — evolving as new technologies come to market.

In the 2000s, when the focus shifted to virtualization and the cloud, private networks appeared to lose their importance. But underneath it all, those networks never went away. A lot of businesses still rely on expensive Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) “circuits” from both local and international service providers to bind their major operations together. For example, they may VPN over the standard Internet to hook up smaller remote offices.

But such arrangements can inhibit business agility. They involve dealing with multiple vendors and telco-type operators — some to provision the last mile into a remote office, and some to link corporate HQ with regional HQs in other parts of the world. They also involve managing a variety of different contracts, each with its own variable costs and SLAs, as well as a range of distinct technologies, each with its own set of tools, to deliver a desired end-to-end performance.

A better way

With cloud cross-connect services from providers like Equinix or Megaport and last-mile services from Unitas Global, you can simplify your network connection complexities.

Following the model of the Internet Exchanges, these types of service providers have interconnected facilities throughout the world. And they resell arbitraged capacity across their backbones in the form of virtual private circuits.

Then, through RackConnect Global, you can get a point-and-click, self-service private network that connects your locations and — most importantly — the hyperscale cloud providers. This gives you multicloud connectivity that unifies your entire hybrid environment. 

As a result, you can:

• Reduce the number of wide-area-network vendors you have to negotiate with
• Reduce your resource requirements to manage all the different connections
• Get point-and-click configuration flexibility
• Reduce the costs of connecting into the hyperscalers, with blended arbitraged costs across the network
• Remove your reliance on the Internet for connectivity, thereby enhancing security and availability

Learn more about how RackConnect Global makes it possible to securely connect your locations and clouds.