Untangling Enterprise Networking in the Cloud Age

A good hybrid networking solution provides a dedicated and deterministic route for critical applications by tagging data packets for pre-determined delivery over the public internet. This protects those applications against potential performance degradation due to volatile consumer data traffic, while capitalising on the reach and scalability of the public Internet

For most, harking back to the 1960's evokes images of flower power, tie dye, PVC clothes and the Troggs. These are all relics of a bygone era. In comparison, cloud computing and software as a service, both dreamt up in the 60's, have stood the test of time and have gone on to change the face of enterprise IT architecture forever.

The rise of the cloud, mobility, the Internet of Things and 4G connectivity started to have a momentous impact on enterprise workloads in the past decade and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. As a consequence data streams and storage have been on the move, first across the data centre from dedicated hardware to virtualised compute and storage stacks, then out to third party private cloud providers. While all of this has been going on, what has happened to the enterprise network? Well, in all honesty, not a lot. Yes, transmission speeds have increased, but little has happened in terms of WAN networking technologies and architectures. While software defined networking has revolutionised the data centre, we are some way o SDN delivering on its promise in the WAN in a genuinely interoperable service provider context.

Making the Internet fit for business