A fire at a major French cloud provider in March that took out millions of websites underlines the risks for businesses putting all your eggs in one basket.
The fire at a facility owned by OVHCloud in March took out online service for government, banks and retailers. Nearly 2% of all websites on the .fr domain (the top-level web domain in France) were affected. Some customers had to wait a month before the company was able to bring servers back up and restore access to their applications and workloads and it has been reported that some data may be permanently lost.
The moral of the story is not that single or multi-cloud is better, but that regardless of where applications are hosted, processing is taking place or data is stored, enterprises need to maintain control of the network that keeps critical business services running.
Alkira is platform-agnostic and customer-driven. We support the clouds, firewalls and SD-WANs that customers want. Our customers want agile enterprise networks and an easier journey to multi-cloud networking for redundancy, lower cost and dynamic routing natively across their clouds.
That’s one reason why we were excited to announce that Microsoft has teamed up with Alkira to make our multi-cloud networking platform available to its Azure customers. Not only is Alkira’s Network Cloud available on the Azure Marketplace, but Alkira is part of a highly select group of companies identified as strategic collaborators in Microsoft’s Startups program.
Why would Microsoft back a multi-cloud proposition? I can think of two reasons. First, the Alkira’s Network Cloud benefits Azure customers even if they never leave the Microsoft cloud environment. Networking in any cloud is challenging and the Alkira solution hides the complexities of routing and network management in Azure, making it easier to deploy and manage application workloads, integrate cloud and on-prem services and monitor network traffic from end to end.
Second, Microsoft recognizes that enterprise customers are adopting multi-cloud strategies. It can resist that trend or work with it. Flexera’s State of the Cloud 2021 Report says the average enterprise connects to 2.6 public clouds and that 92% profess to a multi-cloud strategy. The endorsement of Alkira suggests that Microsoft sees the value in enabling its customers’ digital strategies, not trying to hold them back.
Enterprises often connect to different cloud environments to meet different geographic needs or to take advantage of features from a particular provider. But because different clouds implement networking in different ways, it’s much less common to see these clouds working together as a single, seamless environment for enterprise services.
Alkira’s Network Cloud platform enables enterprises to build true multi-cloud networks in a matter of hours or days that would take months or years and millions of dollars in development costs using conventional approaches. Its solution abstracts the complexities and hides the differences between cloud environments, allowing security, disaster recovery and other critical functions to be supported across the entire network with the same levels of visibility and management control traditionally associated with on-prem systems.
Whether customers rely on a single cloud provider or multiple providers, the network is the key to enabling the flexibility, scalability and resilience that enterprises need not just to avoid disaster but to ensure that their businesses triumph.
To learn more about how to simplify cloud networking schedule a 1:1 demo
