According to the Enterprise Strategy Group, more than half of enterprises surveyed report at least 100 intercloud integrations across their application portfolios with the top 5% reporting 1,000 or more. Multicloud networking provides intercloud connectivity between these distributed environments, whether they are public clouds, private clouds, or hybrid clouds. This connectivity enables data and applications to seamlessly interact and communicate across these diverse cloud platforms.
Key aspects of a multicloud connectivity platform include:
1. Connectivity:
Multicloud networking includes establishing physical network connectivity between the organization’s on-premises infrastructure, if applicable, and the various cloud environments being utilized. This connectivity can be achieved through virtual private networks (VPNs) over the public Internet, dedicated connections, MPLS extensions, or cloud-native networking solutions provided by the cloud providers. Multicloud network connectivity increasingly also includes these same types of connections from cloud to cloud.
2. Data Transfer and Integration:
Multicloud networking facilitates the transfer and integration of data between different cloud environments, interconnecting the virtual private clouds, storage, and virtual machines serving the infrastructure for the applications. This includes ensuring data consistency, security, and compliance as data moves between cloud platforms
3. Traffic Routing:
Multicloud networking involves implementing traffic routing to optimize performance and resource utilization across multiple clouds. This may include dynamically routing traffic based on factors such as latency, cost, and availability of resources.
4. Security and Compliance:
Multicloud network security is a critical consideration in multicloud networking. Organizations must implement robust security measures to protect data and applications across diverse cloud environments. This includes enforcing access controls, encrypting data in transit and at rest, and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.
5. Management and Orchestration:
Multicloud networking requires effective multicloud network management and orchestration tools to provision, configure, monitor, and manage networking resources across multiple clouds. Automation and orchestration play a crucial role in simplifying management tasks and reducing operational complexity. There are a range of multicloud networking solutions, including specialized multicloud networking software, and SD-WAN features such as Cisco Cloud Onramp for Multicloud Connectivity, that simplify multicloud management and orchestration.
6. Performance Optimization:
Optimizing performance is essential in multicloud networking to ensure that applications and workloads meet performance requirements across different cloud platforms and global geographies. This may involve leveraging content delivery networks (CDNs), edge computing, and other optimization techniques to minimize latency and improve user experience.
Overall, multicloud networking enables organizations to leverage the unique strengths of multiple different cloud platforms while maximizing flexibility, scalability, and resilience. However, effectively implementing and managing a multicloud network architecture requires careful planning, expertise, and the right combination of tools and technologies.
For a deeper dive on multicloud networking and security solutions, along with a short summary of multicloud networking companies offering multicloud networking services, see Gartner’s research report, Optimize WAN Architectures for Workloads That Span the Hybrid Cloud and the Multicloud, By Simon Richard, Sumit Rajput, 20 December 2022.
Multi-cloud Application Deployment and Delivery Decision Making, Enterprise Strategy Group, February 2023
Note: This Gartner research report is not available for reprint, a Gartner subscription is required. If you would like to schedule a deeper dive on the content covered by this research contact us.
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