What Is Multi-Cloud Networking?

Multi-cloud networking uses multiple public clouds to deliver optimized connectivity and network services to and between applications and workloads. Multi-cloud networking is a broad term that encompasses the connectivity for all on-prem, cloud, and edge services.

In a modern multi-cloud network architecture, the network is resident entirely within the cloud. This includes network services such as routing, security, and network management. This is unlike earlier cloud network approaches where data center infrastructure remains on-prem and only security and network management are in the public cloud.

Each public cloud is unique. Multi-cloud networking should include advanced functionality to abstract these individual cloud constructs and limits, allowing a more standardized and agile connectivity and services approach independent of the selected public cloud.

Transitioning from a single cloud provider to multiple clouds strains existing approaches and creates its own completely unique challenges. Multi-cloud networking therefore should include advanced capabilities for solving these unique multi-cloud adoption challenges such as:

• Multi-cloud network security policy enforcement to and between clouds (leveraging autoscaling multi-cloud network firewalls)
• Multi-cloud network segmentation, extended from on-premise/SD-WAN environments to and across multiple public clouds
• Global multi-cloud network governance, including leveraging network address translation (NAT) to resolve IP address conflicts
• Bandwidth demand can be highly variable in the cloud, making provisioning for peak workloads an overly expensive approach. Elasticity to accommodate on-demand capacity, such as high-volume data transfers, seasonal retail demand, etc. is essential to successful multi-cloud networking.

What are the main benefits of multi-cloud networking?

Access to the best cloud provider for your applications: Enterprises that leverage multiple cloud providers benefit from their unique innovations, geographic advantages, and pricing offers. This becomes an increasingly viable IT strategy if the network has been built with multi-cloud network agility in mind to enable the rapid adoption of new clouds.

Rapid provisioning: By abstracting the underlying constructs and limits of each unique cloud into the multi-cloud network, every cloud can be treated the same, making adding new clouds simple and efficient. This also eliminates the lengthy learning curve associated with onboarding any new cloud.

Lowered risk: An agile multi-cloud network lets enterprises easily leverage services from multiple cloud providers, providing a more balanced disaster recovery model as well as avoiding the costs and rigidity of vendor lock-in.

Improved Day-2 operations: Eliminating operational blindspots with end-to-end visibility, monitoring, and reporting, including establishing a complete inventory of existing cloud deployments and real-time cloud drift monitoring, are all hallmarks of modern multi-cloud networking.

Multi-cloud network architecture: a new approach for cloud

Multi-cloud networking continues to evolve to meet the needs of the cloud era. Led by Alkira, a new kind of multi-cloud network known as Cloud Area Networking is rapidly gaining adoption. This form of multi-cloud network is a fully integrated cloud offering and provides a level of agility and elasticity not found in legacy multi-cloud networks. In particular it provides much more rapid provisioning than other multi-cloud networks, lowering the time to onboard a new cloud provider from the typical 6 months to mere hours.

A Cloud Area Networking platform is delivered entirely as a service with easy point and click design and provisioning. The Cloud Area Networking architecture is more cost effective than traditional multi-cloud networks by eliminating upfront investments and providing pay-as-you-use consumption.