In a world of digital transformation drivers like IoT, AI, and big data, networks must be more intelligent and agile then ever – able to support new applications and use cases without sacrificing performance, security or latency. In such a climate, traditional networks struggle to keep up with the rapid pace of transformation.
In contrast to the traditional model of processing data and applications on-premise, migration to the cloud gives businesses much greater agility. It provides the freedom to rapidly scale infrastructure and resources and connect to essential applications from remote devices at geographically dispersed locations – an ability than is more mission-critical than ever, given the exponential growth in remote working. With such benefits, it’s unsurprising that cloud adoption has grown to the extent that today 94% of companies globally are on the cloud and over 62% of business workloads are running on a hosted cloud service.
However, cloud adoption comes with its own set of challenges. As usage of cloud-based applications results in large spikes in bandwidth requirements, this often leads to unpredictable traffic across an enterprise’s network, which traditional networks are not equipped to deal with. Additionally, these applications were often accessed over public Internet, presenting additional data security and network reliability concerns. As such, modern businesses are increasingly looking to SD WAN to optimise their cloud experience and improve productivity.
SD WAN leverages existing connectivity infrastructure to optimise performance by assessing the parameters of cloud-based applications and routing them across the most appropriate link to improve the application’s performance. It offers control over traffic, prioritisation and intelligent routing for key applications, and overall improvement of end-user experience and therefore business productivity.
Critically, SD WAN offers additional security features, vital when sending sensitive data over public Internet to the cloud or other sites. It also extends the inherent SD WAN benefits of analytics and optimisation to connectivity to the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) and provides an end-to-end SLA for all connectivity types (MPLS, Internet, Wireless and Cloud) for enterprise networks.
This year, Colt has launched SD WAN Multi-Cloud – a feature which enables direct, reliable and secure connectivity towards multiple clouds via a transit gateway. Colt SD WAN Multi-Cloud utilises the extensive, SDN-optimised Colt IQ Network to provide high performance, inexpensive, and secure cloud connectivity directly into the CSP.
This solution brings together a single cohesive view of the enterprise network, tying together WAN sites and cloud infrastructure – all easily viewed and managed via the Colt SD WAN portal. Through SD WAN Multi-Cloud, customers can combine management of their branch site to WAN connectivity with private, direct connectivity to their IaaS/SaaS applications with multiple CSPs over a single infrastructure and benefit from end-to-end security, performance SLA, and visibility.
Today, Colt SD WAN Multi-Cloud supports AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud across Europe, with more to come later in the year.
Find out more about our SD WAN solution here.