Cloud storage background, remixed from public domain by Nasa
Enterprises are rapidly moving towards digitalisation by adopting emerging technologies to automate and accelerate their business processes efficiently. One such wave of emergence in the network space has been SDCI (Software Defined Cloud Interconnect). SDCIs provide private network connectivity between enterprises and public cloud service providers (CSPs).
Enterprises adopted cloud initially to benefit from its simplicity, agility, flexibility, and scalability. They also started adopting multiple clouds, with integration rates of 80% across their businesses, to benefit from the features and capabilities that the different CSPs offer. Notably, 78% of them are using more than 3 public clouds.
This increased multi cloud adoption meant that the complexity grew, with enterprises finding it difficult to deal with the multiplier effect caused by the adoption of clouds. They also have to deal with their legacy estates of branch offices, regional offices, private data centers in their site persona mix. This has started impacting the enterprises adversely, having to deal with limitations in visibility and increased costs. It has also become difficult to rectify or increase the performance bottleneck affecting the end-users.
Enterprises tend to try resolving these issues through their own capabilities, which fall short when dealing with such complexity. Large enterprises end up creating islands within the operations and management functions, which results in a sub-optimal outcome impacting the ROI and the acceleration of adoption. With limited use case solving exposure, lean technical operations, teams struggle to integrate the public cloud infrastructure with the rest of their enterprise fabric.
The usage of multiple clouds has also resulted in increased costs, especially due to unaccounted egress costs. According to Gartner, egress costs contribute to 15-20% of the cloud bills. While this figure might appear conservative, our discussions with the customers show that they incur about 40% on egress costs in their overall cloud bill.
While this adoption to multiple clouds might seem daunting, there are quite a few benefits which this next wave of technology provides.
Flexibility: Multi-cloud gives organisations the flexibility to choose services from a variety of cloud providers, ensuring they best match specific business requirements.
Agility: Adopting multiple cloud vendors increases agility, enabling faster solution development, and fostering innovation.
Quick time to market: The agility of multi-cloud ensures rapid deployment from identifying business needs to secure solutions, enabling faster time to market.
Cost optimisation: Choosing from multiple cloud providers results in cost efficiencies, especially advantageous in situations requiring high storage costs.
Built-in redundancy: Multi-cloud architecture by its very nature adds redundancy across global providers, ensuring flexibility and availability during downtime.
Tata Communications IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect helps enterprises benefit from multi-cloud by providing a simple, flexible, scalable and secure Multi-Cloud connectivity as-a-Service.
IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect is built on our global digital fabric that connects cloud to cloud, data center to cloud and user to the cloud.
IZO™ MULTI CLOUD CONNECT IS
Simple and Flexible
IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect provides a self-service portal (TCx) to manage and monitor connectivity to multiple cloud services. It simplifies network management tasks, reduces administrative overhead, and provides better visibility and control over the multi-cloud network.
TCx, our customer journey platform provides configurability, manageability and visibility across enterprise WAN and multi-cloud fabric. TCx also delivers programmability to create, configure, scale, and manage multiple cloud connections easily.
Scalable and Reliable
The platform provides enhanced scalability of up to 100Gbps as well as supporting multiple virtual network functions to bring the cloud services closer to your control. IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect delivers secure and dependable access to the clouds, that can scale up and down in line with the business needs. Our global fabric delivers an uptime that is unparalleled, delivering up to 100% guaranteed SLAs with fully redundant architecture options.
Secure
IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect extends security through private connection to cloud and secure WAN fabric that extends the users to cloud. It helps mitigate security risks associated with transmitting data over the public Internet. With IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect, enterprises can maintain higher levels of security, confidentiality, and compliance for their data and applications in a hybrid-cloud or multi-cloud architecture.
Tata Communications IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect customer cases
Enabling seamless migration for the Airlines
A leading airline in India embarked on a transformation journey, migrating their applications to public cloud, as a part of their ‘Cloud-First Strategy’.
This brought about the need to transition from the existing on-premises architecture to a multi-cloud environment. The migration involved transferring workloads, including network and security components, across three different cloud platforms.
Challenges
Performance Assurance: Maintaining a reliable and high-performance connection throughout the migration process was critical. 2000+ users including travel agents and employees of the airline needed to access Amadeus PSS on a daily basis.
Scalability: Needed an on-demand platform to scale capability according to the business needs.
Network Architecture Simplification: The network hetero-geneity between SDWAN in India and non-SDWAN internationally hindered efficient access to Amadeus cloud. They also needed a streamlined approach to seamlessly translation between private and public IP addresses.
Our Solution: IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect offered a secure and performant solution by establishing low latency connections between the different cloud platforms.
85% of the airlines ticketing revenue now flows through the platform. More than 2 million transactions are processed each day, with 100% availability since deployment.
Benefits
Simplified Architecture: IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect facilitated a streamlined architecture for NAT management within the cloud environment.
Cost Management: By leveraging multiple clouds, the airline switched from a capex model to an opex model. The airline is also able to minimise egress costs associated with public clouds.
Enhanced Performance: Offered a highly performant and reliable connection to Amadeus, exceeding industry standards with a 99.99% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA).
Improving Customer Experience for the Contact Centre agents
Challenge
A technology consulting firm faced issues with dropped calls and poor voice quality for their US clients. The problem stemmed from their APAC-based agents relying on internet access to reach Azure Communication Services (ACS) in Singapore.
More than 20% in cost savings, with 100% availability and uninterrupted access for the agents to access the platform.
Our Solution: IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect provided the answer. All five agent locations in different parts of the world were connected via a secure, redundant network using a combination of Global VPN and our private MPLS VPN.
Benefits
Superior Voice Quality: Advanced cloud network infrastructure and optimized routing algorithms to prioritize voice traffic, resulting in clearer and more reliable voice communications for agents leading to improved productivity.
Enhanced Security Measures: Secure data transfer across different platforms, while being regulatory compliant, ensures protection of sensitive customer information.
Faster Delivery: They can now connect, scale, or add any new connections to their contact center applications with 3X the speed via our IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect platform.
Enhancing Connectivity for a leading high-volume trading platform
A leading financial services provider faced significant challenges with their existing infrastructure.
Challenges
Connectivity Issues: Inadequate reliability and availability between their private data centers (DCs) in Mumbai and Chennai and cloud providers hindered real-time transaction processing.
Uptime Concerns: Downtime and disruptions impacted critical trading applications, leading to potential financial losses and diminished customer satisfaction.
Dependency on Incumbent Provider: Relying solely on other providers 400 Mbps connection limited scalability and redundancy options, exacerbating reliability issues.
Our Solution: IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect provided a full mesh cloud to cloud architecture to optimise the network infrastructure.
Benefits
Enhanced Reliability: Seamless failover capabilities and a full mesh topology improved connectivity reliability (~100%) and availability, minimizing the risk of downtime and ensuring uninterrupted trading operations.
Improved Performance: Optimized network infrastructure and low-latency connections facilitated faster transaction processing, enhancing the overall user experience for their clients.
Scalability and Redundancy: The adoption of hybrid cloud solutions and full mesh connectivity provided scalability and redundancy options, empowering the customer to expand their infrastructure and accommodate future growth without sacrificing performance or reliability.
