The Onug Blog
Enterprise Cloud 2.0 Technology Solutions, Strategy and Use Cases
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There’s an old retail adage that the customer is king. Well, extending that ideology into today’s digital business, we might say the user is king. Whether it’s customers, partners, or employees, they’ve all come to expect an application experience that is always-on. They don’t care if the source of the problem is the application or the network: things should just work. Today’s modern enterprise is in the midst of a network and cloud transformation. Networks are supporting more business-critical applications than ever before and at…
The Internet is perhaps the greatest of mankind’s infrastructure achievements. It has virtually unlimited use cases. For Enterprises, it has become an integral part of connectivity, with over 90% of SaaS access leveraging best-efforts public Internet. In fact, many SD-WAN deployments rely exclusively on Internet for connectivity. There are a growing number of Enterprise use cases, however, that have exposed the inherent limitations of these public networks: applications that rely on real-time protocols, like video and voice; modern SaaS and IaaS, particularly over long-haul distances,…
Multi-cloud is marching its way beyond “buzz word” to a real deployment scenario. Some key drivers behind this new normal include: Preference: Different internal teams can have different preferences when picking clouds due to each team’s competency and specialization No lock-in: To avoid vendor “lock-in” and reduce reliance on one cloud provider, not only to gain stronger negotiating power but also help to build a more resilient infrastructure Efficiency: To promote operational efficiency that generates positive business outcomes, e.g. enabling rapid migration when pricing or…
With many organizations adopting a direct-to-internet networking strategy for their branch locations, there is considerable interest in how to architect the security. This is especially true if the organization is also adopting SD-WAN as part of their branch networking strategy. That’s because that SD-WAN can be architected in many different ways, and that can make security options hard to implement without making compromises. At a baseline, security at the branch should not be different than security at headquarters. There’s no reason why a person at…
You might have heard that multicloud is the future of IT. It would be more accurate to say it’s the present of IT. More than 80 percent of enterprises already have a multicloud strategy. But what is multicloud, exactly? As the name suggests, multicloud is an IT approach in which an organization uses multiple cloud services from more than one provider. Hybrid cloud versus multicloud Hybrid cloud and multicloud might sound like the same thing, but there is one crucial difference. With hybrid cloud, an…
Modern traffic steering has evolved into a multi-dimensional optimization problem. From ensuring availability, minimizing latency, maximizing throughput, preventing flapping, and meeting CDN commits; we ask more from our infrastructure today than ever before. With so many competing interests, how do we guarantee an exceptional user experience while still achieving a diverse set of business goals? Redundancy is an essential first requirement in modern application architecture. Investing in redundancy means investing in drop-in replacements to be available in times of crisis. Back-up infrastructure prevents downtime for…
When I started my career in networking (longer ago than I care to admit), the industry was struggling with incompatible systems at the protocol and interface level. As a budding young engineer concerned with ordering a chaotic technosphere, the OSI model seemed like just the remedy. That was an era where innovation moved a lot more slowly. Today, when innovation is advancing at the pace of business, we need to use software and systems to innovate, just like we do with protocols. System APIs and…
SD-WAN opens up many security options to explore. For virtualized security, as more companies adopt SD-WAN technology to enhance the agility of their networking architecture, they must give strong consideration to how and where to apply security across the network. For example, retailers with a lot of store locations can benefit from virtualized SD-WAN and security. Companies that fit this model typically have key applications that run at a centralized data center. They use internet VPNs at the branches to connect back to the mothership…
About 30 years ago, we began connecting devices such as routers, hubs, and printers to IP networks. That meant these resources went from being mostly housed in one location like a data center to spread all throughout an organization’s operations. IT and NetOps teams immediately recognized that they needed a standardized way to monitor and manage those devices remote. And Presto! the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) was born. SNMP made it “simple” for network management systems to request and receive data from the ever-growing…
I will be first to admit that marketing can sometimes get ahead of reality. It is our job to create a story that paints an appealing vision of the future, knowing that it may take a little while for engineering to actually “catch up”. And when multiple vendors start screaming the same buzzwords from the top of multiple different mountains, the line between product and PowerPoint can become a bit blurred and confusing. “AI for IT” is a perfect example of this. Customers want an…
