Networking is not immune to industry shifting changes around cloud and SaaS computing. Traditional networking perimeters encompassed corporate assets either in an on premises datacenter or third-party co-location centers to the border of corporate networks. The risk factors were minimized; requiring a simple set of tools to manage and limit security vectors.
However, networking professionals must re-evaluate their strategy around the access and security of both local and remote services upon the introduction of applications and infrastructure solutions hosted through multiple world-wide, cloud-based services.
Today, more organizations than ever are looking to take advantage of hybrid and multi-cloud architectures to deliver their applications1. But many of them see their current approach to application delivery networking as a hindrance to cloud adoption. In fact, a recent IDC Survey on multi-cloud application delivery reveals that 82 percent of those surveyed believe that their organization’s ability to migrate apps to the cloud is hindered by the increased complexity of their network infrastructure. Survey respondents also expressed a preference for improved networking reliability (58 percent), improved security (60 percent), and also improved visibility (44 percent).
A new architecture is needed to address the challenges of moving applications to multi-cloud and SaaS. This new secure digital perimeter needs to provide:
- Reliable access and delivery
- Trusted Security and control
- Full visibility through intelligent analytics
Let’s take a closer look at the three requirements and how they changed from the traditional environments.
First, organizations need to provide the reliable access and delivery to ensure that users are able to access their resources from any location in this new world. This requirement extends to wherever those people are located, including the company branch, home, or anywhere on any network. The services these users are trying to reach are located around the globe, as well as in the data center. Because these services are now managed outside the corporate purview, new technologies such as SD-WAN are required to aggregate all types of networks for a consistent user experience no matter where they are.
Second, Trusted Security and control turns the tradition of access to, and then authentication to your resource on its head. This methodology exposes vulnerabilities and attacks to your network. By authenticating a user before allowing access to resources in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, it reduces your security vectors dramatically. The Web App Firewall (WAF) and Unified Gateway (UAG) components assist in securing access to your resources.
Finally, you will need full visibility provided by intelligent analytics. Now that many of the resources and services no longer reside on premise or in third-party datacenters, and because of increased complexity, being able to harness and consolidate the usage, system, and network data streams becomes paramount to understanding end user behavior and app performance. Collecting data from in-line network functions and applying anomaly detection and other advanced analytics techniques allows the data to be harnessed and turned into business insights about apps, networks and end user performance.
In short, Citrix NetScaler simplifies networking in a hybrid- and multi-cloud world.
Over the next three weeks, we will take a deep-dive into these three needs and on how Citrix helps to simplify networking in a hybrid- and multi-cloud world.
[1] Source: “How do Organizations Plan to Assure Application Delivery in a Multi-Cloud World?” an IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by Citrix, Oct. 2017.
