SDWAN — The Future of Cloud Networking
Recently, at a cloud summit, we ran into the CTO of one of India’s largest automobile companies. He told us that he recently started experiencing major issues with his cloud network. He said:
“You know, after our recent migration to the cloud, we started spending all our time and tons of money on our network alone. We had to increase bandwidth and allocate more technical support folks to the network.”
Isn’t that surprising? It certainly begs the question:
Why is it that even today, WAN- the very network which made the cloud possible- is adding to our troubles once we switch?
Here’s a simple analogy.
Consider today’s megacities, with their superior road infrastructure, complete with highways, underpasses, flyovers, multi-carriage roads, by-lanes, etc.
Now imagine them without the centralised traffic signals of today.
Instead, your friendly local traffic policeman, mans every intersection.
Each policeman focuses only on his station and what he can see. He doesn’t know about the intersection two blocks away or what his fellow policemen are doing elsewhere.
This, is a recipe for disaster. Collisions, bottlenecks, and not to mention, inefficiency, would rule the roads. Chaos would ensue and it’s hard to imagine a city like that.
That is how enterprise networks are today.
Every network gateway makes its own independent decisions, even though there are a crazy number of applications with different bandwidth demands, and it clearly doesn’t work well when your network scales or reaches the cloud.
Yet, we’ve ignored this simple impediment for the longest time now.
As more and more businesses migrate to the cloud, they bring with them their users and customers who are all over the place- working from home, buying from different channels, constantly on the move. Applications are deployed everywhere- SaaS cloud, private cloud, public cloud, etc.
So, both the endpoints of enterprise communication– users and applications are constantly moving. This poses a huge challenge on the Wide Area Network (WAN), that currently connects users to the applications.
WAN hasn’t kept up with the pace of the cloud, so it all falls on our IT teams, to keep this network simple, safe and fast, no matter what.
That simply doesn’t work.
In short, we currently face three key challenges when we migrate networks to the cloud:
Firstly, the network becomes complex.
Secondly, you need fast reaction to bandwidth needs, without depending on the same Service Provider across your network.
Thirdly, mixing the public cloud and your existing on-premise cloud, means you need instant visibility into network and link performance, so you can see what your users are complaining about, and who is fishing for your data.
In essence, what used to be easier before, has become harder.
Earlier, you simply bought a Firewall or a Router, fixed your bandwidth budget, and forgot about your WAN once it started working.
But now, you’re in constant need of upgrades.
This becomes even harder if your business is distributed or is ‘location-hungry’ like retail, healthcare, logistics, insurance, banking, travel, news & media, real estate, education or consulting services.
And this, is why Lavelle Networks exists.
Analogous to the adaptive, coordinated or dynamic control traffic signals that are critical to our cities, we use Software Defined Networking (SDN) principles, to build and offer centralized intelligence, control, security and performance to your Wide Area Networks.
Our Network-as-a-Service solutions vastly simplify network management, dramatically improve visibility, and turbo charge your network performance- all delivered using enterprise grade security.
Our network controller, ‘CloudStation’, runs on the public cloud like Microsoft Azure, and completely manages and runs your enterprise network. ‘CloudPort’, our intelligent SDN gateway, sits in your enterprise network– both premise and cloud- and functions as a firewall, VPN, router and bandwidth aggregator.
You simply place CloudPort in your enterprise locations or branches, and log in to CloudStation to operate your network. It takes just 3–4 operational steps, no matter the change or scale.
We enable you to truly realise the benefits of the cloud, without compromising on your enterprise network.
We eliminate your network complexity, help you use as much bandwidth as required without depending on single providers, and provide instant visibility for security or performance, in a network which is always agile.
The cloud and SaaS have no doubt been powerful enablers for business transformation, but we believe that it needs a next generation network architecture to go the distance.
In the future, we envision an SDWAN platform built for the cloud, powered by its pay-as-you-grow model, that brings the same simplicity to networking that the cloud brings to your computing and storage today.
We are excited that Xpedition, our cloud-first network platform, is delighting customers who are embracing the cloud for the most important change coming their way — digital transformation.
In our journey to bring SDWAN to your enterprise cloud, we are delighted to have amazing partnership with our advisors and investors at Ideaspring Capital.
Together, we actively pursue one goal — to bring next generation networking to your cloud, and help your enterprise race ahead in this world of digital transformation.
This article was written by Shyamal Kumar, Founder and CEO, Lavelle Networks.
