Your products and services are key to achieving profitable growth. For most IT companies those products and services are application-based and are the big driver for their cloud strategy. By placing your applications and services as close as possible to your customers you can significantly enhance their user experience. However, migrating your applications and services out of your own private data centre means you no longer control the underlying network. As a result, connectivity in this new public cloud environment can be very complex.
Security is a major concern, each cloud provider has a slightly different mechanism and translating the policies from your physical firewalls to the virtual constructs that a cloud provider gives you is not straightforward.
Connectivity is another major challenge as all your SME’s in that area are used to using MAC addresses or IP Addresses, which don’t exist in the public cloud environment. IP addresses are also not static* (You can pay extra for that), and they are very likely to change with any reboot of the underlying hardware (which you don’t have access).
I fully believe that no team can be successful if they are beholden to one another to achieve their goals. In the public cloud environment, the DevOps team has an objective to get a new application(or an old one) deployed in the cloud and operational by a certain date. In most cases, they need to engage their CloudOps team who are responsible for infrastructure and connectivity. However, the CloudOps team are not the application experts. This leads to the CloudOps team requiring the DevOps team to define all the connectivity needs of an application, then trying to put the virtual constructs in place to achieve this inevitably, this leads to miscommunications, tests failing and lengthy troubleshooting.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if there was a simple way to add your cloud environment, discover the infrastructure, applications and services that have already been deployed there and configure secure policies that can control all the connectivity needs of the applications without needing expert-level networking skills… Well good news! IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh provides precisely that, and we have a video that demonstrates how it works.
#hybrid-cloud
#MultiCloud
#networking