Implement Multi-cloud Strategy with SD WAN

Cloud technologies are driving the next wave of growth in our increasingly digital world. As enterprises progressively adopt a cloud-centric in their operations, they need a strategy that provides reliability, scalability, and a network capable of keeping up with this pace of transformation.

Gartner predicts that enterprise IT spending on public cloud computing will overtake spending on traditional IT within the application software, infrastructure software, business process services and system infrastructure markets by 2025.

By 2025, 51% of IT spending in these four categories will have shifted from traditional solutions to the public cloud, compared to 41% in 2022. Additionally, nearly two-thirds (65.9%) of spending on application software will be directed toward cloud technologies, up from 57.7%. Gartner also predicts that worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services will grow from $494.7 billion in 2022 to almost $600 billion in 2023.

The cloud is clearly growing at a rapid rate. The next challenge for enterprises would be to ensure that they have the infrastructure and resources to meet this rate of growth. While public cloud services provide simplicity and scalability, without the right strategy, they run the risk of downtime or even outages.

Boosting Reliability with Multi-cloud

If enterprises were to rely on just one cloud service provider for all their data, applications and services, a single network issue could hugely impact their entire business.

According to Forrester, every major cloud provider experienced outages in 2021, with some even lasting for a few hours. Some of these were related to human errors combined with automation, while others were due to cyberattacks such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against key cloud infrastructure.

This is where a multi-cloud strategy becomes essential.

A multi-cloud strategy enables enterprises to spread their workloads across multiple public cloud providers – thereby reducing the impact of potential outages on their operations. If one provider is down, they can simply move their data, applications, and services onto another provider in their multi-cloud ecosystem and get back up and running fast.

Moreover, adopting a multi-cloud approach is also a great strategy for improving application performance and user experiences. Enterprises can allocate different workloads to different clouds according to factors such as the proximity to the end user to ensure quality of service (QoS) and experience (QoE) for customers. By leveraging a combination of providers, enterprises can fulfil specific workload requirements, selecting the optimal combination of providers that best suits their unique needs.

Adding Scalability with SD WAN

A robust network is vital for Public multi-cloud to work seamlessly. Traditional network architectures such as MPLS can be complex and clunky to adapt, making them a difficult option for the flexible and scalable nature of multi-cloud.

One challenge with legacy networks such as MPLS is that they backhaul Public cloud-bound traffic to the headquarters’ data centre for security purposes. This increases latencies, resulting in poor application performance and end-user experience (UX). While MPLS is less ideal than SD WAN for Public Cloud access, it is suitable for Private access to Virtual Private Cloud.

Software-defined wide-area networking (SD WAN) is built with scalability at the core. This often makes it a more suitable option for enterprises utilising multiple public cloud providers, who need the flexibility and scalability to grow their cloud operations without being hindered by their network. SD WAN also provides local access to Software as a Service (SaaS), greatly improving the users’ productivity and experience.

A comprehensive SD WAN solution removes the need to backhaul to the data centre, helping to reduce latencies, improve UX and lessen the cost of bandwidth connectivity between data centres and cloud providers. This is thanks to a variety of unique SD WAN features.

Epsilon SD WAN offers the following benefits:

1. Accelerated Network Agility – Deployments are fast and scalable, helping to easily meet the varying demands of on-premises and multi-cloud workloads.
2. No Backhauling – Direct cloud access at remote branches minimises additional traffic to the core network, eliminating the need to backhaul traffic to the HQ data centre, therefore boosting performance and cost-efficiency across clouds.
3. Simplified WAN Management – Centralised orchestration provides complete visibility and control across disparate networks and multiple locations from a single pane of glass. This simplifies the process of sending secure connectivity and configuration policies to multiple cloud providers, ensuring that consistent policies are enforced across an enterprise’s network.
4. Optimised Application Performance – SD WAN enables prioritisation of business-critical applications, dynamically routes traffic, automatically mitigates performance issues, and deploys application-aware failover to improve WAN and multi-cloud performance and availability.
5. Heightened Security – Improve security by encrypting and tunnelling traffic, and layer additional firewalls and cloud security options to create an integrated multi-cloud solution.
6. Reduced WAN Cost – Epsilon’s secure Ethernet, cost-effective Broadband Internet, and direct Cloud Access solutions can be combined to create a new software-defined model that simplifies multi-cloud network management and reduces cost.

Transforming the Future of the Enterprise

By combining multi-cloud and SD WAN, enterprises can benefit from an intelligent networking solution that can keep up with the demands of our cloud-first world.

SD WAN simplifies the adoption of a multi-cloud strategy and facilitates the digital transformation of enterprise operations. It provides the options to pivot and scale according to demands, while ensuring optimal performance and reliability for routing traffic, minimising downtime and maximising agility.

With SD WAN, enterprises can easily add more clouds to their strategy and move data, applications, and services between these, while maintaining security, performance, and cost efficiency for the successful future of their business.

Get in touch today if you’d like to learn more about how to transform your WAN into an application-aware and agile network with Epsilon’s flexible and cloud-optimised SD WAN solution.