The Onug Blog
Enterprise Cloud 2.0 Technology Solutions, Strategy and Use Cases
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Just a few years ago, the most frequent challenges experienced by branch offices were the result of a slow connection to the central data center. Over time, this grew to include the inability to deploy reliable latency-sensitive applications and services at the branch, such as VoIP or video conferencing. While MPLS was adopted to resolve these connectivity and performance issues, those connections were also rigid and static, requiring critical data to exist at a single location. Today, not only do branch transactions, workflows, applications, and…
Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) is creating new opportunities for businesses and consumers. Indeed, PwC, a major consultancy, expects AI to contribute over $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030. At the same time, within the data centre, a move to micro-services-based software architectures, distributed storage, and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) workloads are pushing east-west traffic to previously unseen heights. Research predicts that the AI adoption rate will reach 86% by 2025. This will also have a big impact on the data centre network, when…
Digital transformation is accelerating within the enterprise, as businesses seek to improve agility, avoid disruption, and gain competitive advantage. As part of this transformation, enterprises are increasingly leveraging cloud-based applications and services and embracing mobility and a distributed workforce. Bandwidth consumption is dramatically expanding to accommodate SaaS, and the prospect of rising transport costs and suboptimal employee digital experience is creating greater pressure on enterprises to move away from their legacy WAN in favor of one optimized for the cloud. The WAN Bends to the…
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…
