THERE’S A LANGUAGE BARRIER WHEN IT COMES TO CLOUD TERMINOLOGY THESE DAYS. Vendors, users, and service providers have been throwing around the terms “hybrid cloud” and “multi-cloud” interchangeably, but although these two things are similar, they are simply not the same, as John Fruehe, an independent enterprise technology analyst based in Austin, explains.
“Hybrid cloud is using public and private clouds for the same application. A multi-cloud environment is using multiple clouds without any orchestration between the two,” he says. The two models do have a few things in common, however.
For example, one of the most difficult aspects of both hybrid and multi-cloud environments is visibility. In the past, IT’s domain of ownership was within the perimeter of the organization. IT could access, track, and control everything it owned and used. Now ownership extends out across the Internet to clouds that are operating on third-party cloud platform infrastructure. The base networking provided on these is cloud-platform specific, and the burden is left to enterprise IT to understand and operate these different environments.
“As shadow IT cloud deployments move to enterprise IT managed cloud deployments, there is a need for a common architectural and operational network model to help save operational costs and reduce security risk,” says Jeff Raymond, vice president of EOS product management and services at Arista Networks, a software-driven cloud networking provider based in Santa Clara, Calif.
“When you have a platform that gives you zero touch provisioning, an automated framework, and an analytics engine, you can control your environment in a uniform manner and proactively fix connectivity problems, gaining a faster time to resolution for issues.”
-JEFF RAYMOND,
Vice President of EOS Product Management
IT can view the actual data and applications, but as workloads move between clouds, IT may find itself faced with connectivity issues that it has no way to evaluate or fix. The solution is having a single view of all cloud instances so that IT is able to make network-wide upgrades and changes. Also important: the ability to track visibility and availability metrics across the entire hybrid cloud environment, including public cloud direct connections, remote data center connections, and cloud exchange points. This is difficult for most cloud users, though. Most use manual scripting, which isn’t turnkey.
As we move into 2018, many companies are considering solutions that simplify the integration and management of external cloud resources. “Organizations currently need a way to extend the operations and security policies of the data center network,” explains Raymond. “When you have a platform that gives you zero touch provisioning, an automated framework, and an analytics engine, you can control your environment in a uniform manner and proactively fix connectivity problems, gaining a faster time to resolution for issues.”
www.arista.com
