{"id":44359,"date":"2021-07-13T11:37:33","date_gmt":"2021-07-13T03:37:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/?p=44359"},"modified":"2021-07-13T11:37:38","modified_gmt":"2021-07-13T03:37:38","slug":"less-complexity-more-control-role-of-multi-cloud-networking-in-digital-transformation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/2021\/07\/13\/less-complexity-more-control-role-of-multi-cloud-networking-in-digital-transformation\/","title":{"rendered":"Less complexity, more control: Role of multi-cloud networking in digital transformation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Guy Matthews<\/em>
Editor, NetReporter<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the past 15 years enterprises experimented with SaaS applications, took advantage of plentiful cheap compute and storage and migrated desktop workloads to the cloud, yet still have not managed to achieve digital transformation. Panelists at the NetEvents session on multi-cloud (see box) agreed that we are finally on the brink of a generation change in IT driven by business necessity and enabled by new cloud-native solutions to decades-old problems. The revolution will finally see the traditional data centre model retired as monolithic software is replaced with highly distributed, high-performance cloud-native applications. But the major challenge in the battle for the future remains the complexity of building networks fit for the cloud era. According to our expert panel, true digital transformation cannot happen without infrastructure capable of supporting distributed development and IT operations, and able to provide enterprises with full visibility and control of their environments.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Making Multi-cloud and Hybrid Cloud Work<\/strong> on 14 April 2021 brought together an expert panel comprising two of the biggest names in networking, Cisco and Verizon and two of the industry\u2019s hottest start-ups, Alkira and Aviatrix. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vijoy Pandey, Vice President of Engineering and Chief Technology Officer, Cisco\u00a0<\/strong>
Vijoy is an engineer and innovator with 80+ patents issued in distributed systems and networking, with over 20 publications in networking, and numerous keynotes, talks and panel appearances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oliver Cantor, Associate Director of Verizon Global Products<\/strong>
Oliver has spent more than 25 years with two of the biggest companies in global telecommunications, Ericsson and now Verizon. His background is in engineering and product development, while his professional interests include trends in distributed computing, organisational culture, and the influence of economic and geographic trends on industry.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amir Khan, President, CEO and co-founder, Alkira<\/strong>
Amir and his brother Atif pioneered the $5bn global market for SD-WAN with their last start-up, Viptela, which they sold to Cisco in 2017. The Khan brothers have numerous technology patents. Their latest venture Alkira was set up to solve the next big problem in IT \u2013 networking in the cloud era. The company attracted $76 million in venture funding from, among others, Kleiner Perkins, Google and Koch Disruptive Technologies. \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steve Mullaney, President and CEO, Aviatrix<\/strong>
Steve brings 30 years of marketing, product management, and engineering experience in network infrastructure and security to Aviatrix. Most recently, Steve was the CEO of Nicira Inc., a network virtualization and software-defined networking company, from 2009 until it was acquired in 2012 by VMware for $1.26 billion. He has also held senior roles at Palo Alto Networks, Cisco and other industry leading firms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brad Casemore, VP Research, Datacenter and Multicloud Networking, IDC (chair)<\/strong>
Brad is one of the foremost authorities on data center, networking and cloud technologies in the analyst community. Brad provides ongoing research for IDC\u2019s Continuous Information Service (CIS), market forecasts, custom consulting and go-to-market services. He is a regular speaker at major industry event and source of media comment and opinion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Brad Casemore, VP Research, Datacenter and Multicloud Networking, IDC defines multi-cloud networking as the infrastructure that supports distributed enterprise workloads. \u201cWe all know that we’ve entered, as a result of digital transformation, a cloud era where more and more enterprises are harnessing the cloud for agility, for flexibility, for perceived cost savings. And increasingly, as a result of the pandemic, they’re also leveraging cloud for business resilience and continuity,\u201d he said.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But complexity is a major stumbling block for enterprises, whether they\u2019re keen to move to multi-cloud or simply resigned to the inevitability of it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Casemore said: \u201cYou’re dealing with discrete clouds, you’re dealing with disparate APIs associated with each cloud, you’re dealing with different service insertion models, you’re dealing with different network constructs. Look at some of the infrastructure issues and particularly the network issues that relate to multi-cloud, and enterprises find them daunting, they find them intimidating, and it has become somewhat of an inhibitor to them fully leveraging multi-cloud for business benefits and outcomes.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With organizations running more and more workloads in the cloud, refactoring existing applications and building new distributed cloud-native apps, the traditional data centre was also becoming distributed, Casemore says, which is why multi-cloud is no longer a choice for many enterprises but a necessity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oliver Cantor, Associate Director of Verizon Global Products observed that the shape of networks is being changed not by technology per se but by new patterns of use \u2013 a move from what he calls static to dynamic digitization. \u201cIn the past, you could say that networks connected islands of compute together, LANs and telephone exchanges and other things.  What are they connecting together now? Well workloads, and workloads are moving, data is moving, users are moving, everything’s on the move.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vijoy Pandey, VP Engineering and CTO at Cisco agreed: \u201cIn the end there are applications and there are users and nothing else really matters,\u201d he said. The impact of distributed applications on the role of the network is profound, however. \u201cThese big behemoths are being split apart, their guts are being taken out and they\u2019re being strewn across the Internet.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pandey said that software was being increasingly atomized, with collections of APIs and microservices woven together to form enterprise applications spanning on-prem systems and clouds. \u201cThe network is becoming the runtime for all these apps\u201d and no longer just an underlying transport but \u201cfull-stack connectivity, security and observability from the application layer to the virtualization bare metal\u201d, Pandey said.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amir Khan, President, CEO and co-founder of Alkira, said he started his business because he could see that while the cloud was providing enormous resources and enterprises were keen to push more applications and workloads out of the data centre, \u201cnetworking was lagging, it had not adapted to the cloud\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen we started looking deeper into how each of the clouds was providing networking capabilities, they were all different. So we had to build our own virtual infrastructure in the cloud because otherwise all the underlying nuances and details were being exposed to customers and multi-cloud environments were not being adopted at the pace that was needed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steve Mullaney, President and CEO of Aviatrix, agreed that even recent networking constructs were under threat from the mass migration of enterprises to the cloud. \u201cSD-WAN is dead. Why? Because it\u2019s not about going back to the data centre, it\u2019s about going to the centers of data that are in the cloud. I can\u2019t take the old world and jam it into the cloud, I need a cloud-native solution. However, I\u2019m like the government. I need the visibility, the security controls that I used to have on-prem,\u201d Mullaney said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mullaney likened the marketing promises of the big cloud providers to the brochures for holiday resorts that appeared to provide luxury and choice to guests until they actually arrive at their destination. Then they\u2019re confronted by a fixed menu with no a la carte options. \u201cThey get to the cloud, they\u2019ve been sold a bill of goods and they realize that there is so much complexity, so much that is manual, even within one cloud.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enterprises are rushing headlong into even greater complexity by choosing not just one but several clouds, though as Mullaney pointed out, the multi-cloud trend is more ad hoc than strategic. Business teams were picking different clouds to access a particular application or feature set, creating a multi-cloud by default \u201cnightmare\u201d that was left to the infrastructure team to sort out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Complex or not, enterprises are impatient and IT providers can\u2019t afford to keep them waiting. Verizon\u2019s Oliver Cantor, who likened cloud networking to a \u201cgiant utility\u201d the IT industry is coming together to build, said: \u201cWe have shifted from a supply-side market to a demand-side market. We\u2019re being dragged forward \u2013 and not just by the enterprise customers but by their customers.\u201d    <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alkira\u2019s Khan said that as enterprises became accustomed to shorter application development and deployment times in the cloud, they were no longer prepared to put up with plodding network development. \u201cAs one of our customers says, we need to move at the speed of the business, not the speed of the network and that\u2019s what we\u2019re changing. Now you can deploy global networks within minutes or hours rather than the months or years it used to take.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Cisco\u2019s Pandey agreed that customers are not only tired of waiting but bored of hearing about the technical detail. They want declarative, intent-based models, he argues, \u201csystems that take you from A to B not systems that tell you how to get from A to B\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cantor also detected a growing frustration among customers: \u201cEnterprises are just shaking their heads at all this complexity and are looking for an as-a-service model. At some point, they fell in love with the utility, the usability and the pay-as-you-go ability of the cloud to enable business. The movement to cloud-native from bare metal and monolithic is going to happen, so how do we make sure our customers\u2019 journeys are simple and straightforward?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The panelists agreed that it means going back to layer by layer design principles with clean APIs up and down the protocol stack from application to the lowest levels of connectivity. Without such design rigor, programming or operator errors in a complex highly distributed system could have profound consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cisco\u2019s Pandey said that while it appeared \u201chorribly scary\u201d in terms of connectivity to take monolithic apps and make them cloud-native, the upside is that the resulting discrete components of the application can be swapped out or taken down with fewer consequences to the rest of the system and ultimately to customers. But, he warned, \u201cyou need to have the tools and capabilities to monitor it \u2013 the full-stack observability piece. You need to have discoverability and you need to have security at the API layer all the way down so that you can manage things properly\u201d.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

His comments were echoed by Alkira\u2019s Khan, who pointed out that the problems of a distributed architecture are particularly acute for enterprises trying to apply a security posture in a multi-cloud environment. \u201cThere\u2019s a hodgepodge of instances that you need to stitch together on top of which enterprises are creating static policies. And you cannot do even simple routing or segmentation across these environments today.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The issues of visibility and management control are among the hardest to solve in multi-cloud environments. Aviatrix\u2019s Mullaney argued that these requirements would put enterprises off relying on SaaS offerings, which he characterized as \u201cblack boxes\u201d. It was up to the industry to provide the best of both worlds \u2013 maximum agility and total control, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI have to be able to double, triple, quadruple click down if I need to, to understand what\u2019s going on. This is a problem with the as-a-service and the cloud providers. You say to them \u2018What will happen if something goes wrong?\u2019 and they say \u2018Nothing will go wrong\u2019 and you have this stand-off. If I\u2019m an enterprise, I have to have the visibility and control I used to have in my on-prem infrastructure, but I also want the velocity and agility that go the cloud,\u201d Mullaney added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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