So, if as my last blog reports, the mid-tier UK Financial Services space really is now “going cloud” at pace, then what is the next challenge in the sequence facing the technology team?
Well – as the market survey we conducted at both the HFM COO Summit and the AWS in FS event at The Shard we conducted last week confirmed – at least one of these challenges is “securely glue-ing all of these Clouds together”.
Why?
Well, if you:
• think about the objectives of a Cloud adoption strategy – flexibility, performance, scalability, PAYGO costs, DevSecOps and access to off-the-shelf SaaS applications are key
• think about where you will start to source key applications – Azure/Office 365, AWS, Google, Alibaba, Oracle and Salesforce are key
• recognize that these guys are all competitors
• recognize that direct access to these environments and API’s through any mechanism other than Direct Route-esq Internet facing pipes is unlikely to be allowed from a security viewpoint – even within the same Public Cloud
• recognize that these environments will all be constantly shipping data to each-other e.g. CRM updating email address book, authentication, data warehouse access etc.
• recognize that this data shipping may in fact be global – and in every conceivable direction
• recognize that performant interconnections that can support various traffic profiles are required
… you will also recognize that the success of your firm’s cloud adoption strategy will in some part be dependent on the ability to:
• constantly fine-tune the prioritization and capacity of your “multi-cloud network” to optimize the end-to-end experience of the application users
• securely connect Private Cloud, Public Cloud, SaaS and On-Prem workloads
• quickly respond to new requirements for connectivity between applications
So – how on earth do you do all that!?
The answer lies in Software Defined Networking (SDN). We’ve all heard the term, but until I recently saw demos of two of the WAN products leading this field globally – I didn’t actually “get it”.
Imagine being able to:
• Guarantee a secure connection by “nailing-up” a VPN – from any Cloud (or other) node on your network
• Do this yourself, using a Web Portal – and have that VPN available within minutes
• Vary the bandwidth available to each node on your WAN – from 1 Mbps to 10Gbps – on the fly, again self-serve
• Set 6 different levels of Quality of Service – to prioritise traffic where performance improvement, or a level of temporary burst throughput is required.
• Pay for all of this on demand – in some cases with a minimum committed term of only a single month!
The mind boggles!
Don’t believe it? Then come along to our “Cool Cloud Enablement Tech Showcase for UK FS InTheClouds@The Shard” event at 6PM on 30th November and see it for yourself. After all a picture speaks a thousand words.
For the first time ever we’ll have vendors doing a live demo – and everyone is invited this time (except competitive Telcos of course).