The multi-cloud model offers several benefits, including greater flexibility, less vendor lock-in and competitive pricing. Organizations can choose the cloud services that most precisely fit their needs and budget. However, multi-cloud also presents challenges, particularly when it comes to connectivity.
Most users connect to the cloud using the public Internet. However, organizations increasingly need more secure connections to protect sensitive applications and data. Performance and reliability can also be a concern with latency-sensitive and mission-critical workloads. Private connections address these problems but increase network complexity as organizations add more public cloud services.
Software-defined cloud interconnects (SDCIs) mask this complexity, optimizing multi-cloud connectivity and simplifying management. SDCIs aggregate multiple private connections, giving organizations more flexible and efficient access to cloud environments. The result is greater security, performance, scalability and agility at lower costs.
What Is Private Connectivity?
While the public Internet provides convenient and inexpensive cloud connectivity, it comes with inherent security risks. Additionally, public Internet traffic travels through multiple providers, creating latency that can impede performance. The public Internet is also unreliable — if any provider along the route experiences an outage, data may not reach its destination.
In light of that, many organizations use private connectivity for sensitive information, valuable data assets and mission-critical services. Private connectivity is a direct, dedicated connection that helps ensure security and meet legal and regulatory requirements. Because it bypasses the public Internet, private connectivity also provides lower latency and greater reliability by reducing the number of “hops” between users and the cloud.
Private connectivity can be accessed in multiple ways. Cloud ports provide private connections to a specific cloud provider. Cloud hubs are physical locations that provide private connectivity to multiple cloud providers.
What Are Software-Defined Cloud Interconnects?
SDCIs are services that provide virtual private connections between an organization and multiple public clouds. The SDCI serves as an intermediary, pre-provisioning connectivity from multiple ISPs, network services providers and hubs and aggregating them in physical points of presence (PoPs). Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) technology is used to securely interconnect sites and provide high levels of automation.
Customers connect to the nearest PoP via the Internet or an MPLS link. The SDCI serves as the “middle mile” backbone between the customer and the cloud. SDCIs also provide site-to-site and cloud-to-cloud connections.
What Are the Benefits of SDCIs?
SDCIs offer all the benefits of private connectivity, including improved security and performance. Security is further enhanced through access controls, encryption and other measures. At the same time, SDCIs provide greater flexibility than cloud ports or hubs. Once an organization connects to an SDCI, it gains access to multiple clouds and sites. Organizations can choose the most cost-effective and efficient connections for cloud access and use any type of transport for last-mile connectivity.
All of the cloud interconnects are managed through a single, centralized interface, eliminating the complexity of managing multiple ports and hubs. When SDCI is paired with SD-WAN, IT teams gain greater visibility into cloud interconnects and the ability to automate many tasks.
SDCIs also enable on-demand connectivity. Because they are based on software-defined technologies, SDCIs enable providers to provision new connections in minutes rather than days or weeks. SDCIs are also highly elastic, enabling organizations to scale their cloud interconnectivity up or down as needs change. There’s no need to overprovision hardware or make additional investments. Many SDCI providers offer direct connections to major cloud providers, reducing data egress rates.
How Technologent Can Help
Technologent’s cloud and networking specialists have the expertise to help you take advantage of SDCIs to improve cloud connectivity and simplify management. Through our XaaS practice, we also provide end-to-end services for selecting, managing and optimizing multiple as-a-Service solutions. Our consultants take a hands-on, program management approach, crafting a customized package of solutions and services to precisely meet your needs.
Gartner predicts that 30 percent of enterprises will deploy an SDCI by 2027, up from just 10 percent in 2022. Let us help you evaluate SDCI providers and select the right solution for your multi-cloud strategy.
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