The role of managed services in a multi-cloud world

We spend a lot of time at Coevolve thinking about managed services, and what is required to effectively support enterprises as they transform their networks. Tim Sullivan recently wrote a great series of articles on our approach, and how deeply embedded in our company's DNA this is. You can read the first of these articles here.

One of the major technology trends from the last year has been an increased focus on addressing multi-cloud networking. I presented on this topic at WAN Summit Singapore last year, and explored how technologies like SD-WAN can help deliver a better user experience in a multi-cloud environment:

As we see interest and adoption of multi-cloud growing, we want to ensure that we are building a business that can continue to help enterprises as the 'center of gravity' of their networks moves further into the cloud. Our goal is to be an innovative managed service provider across any environment, and a major component of that will be adding valuable managed services over the top of the multi-cloud technology stack.

What is multi-cloud networking and why is it a challenge?

Let's start by looking at a common trajectory we see many enterprises following. Most of our engagements start with a transformation of the enterprise WAN, and we've written extensively about how we are using SD-WAN to facilitate that change. Following a migration to SD-WAN, this is a pretty common environment:

"Cloud" obviously means different things to different enterprises, and it's important to look at where the real challenges are. Most SD-WAN deployments provide major improvements to public cloud application access by default. They generally can detect SaaS applications correctly, prioritize (or de-prioritize) traffic at an application level, and in some cases provide optimized on-ramps to critical applications.

The bigger challenges arise as the use of cloud infrastructure (typically IaaS) increases, often as a replacement for services traditionally hosted in on-premises data centers. Again, SD-WAN offers some benefits, as we can extend the SD-WAN overlay into the edge of a public cloud environment using a virtual SD-WAN edge. Once this is done, the virtual infrastructure in the cloud environment looks a lot like any other site on the network:

However, for many enterprises the deployment of IaaS doesn't end there. Different geographic regions of the business may require infrastructure deployed closer to their users, and now the enterprise must consider traffic flows that exist within the cloud provider's own network as well as between its own WAN and the edge of the cloud provider:

This is already highly complex, even with a single cloud provider being used. In many cases, the situation is made even more challenging due to the use of additional cloud providers, resulting in a true multi-cloud environment with connectivity required within, and between each component. The enterprise network team is often told about the decision to use a new cloud provider after it is already in use, limiting the ability to consolidate infrastructure and improve consistency:

How can Coevolve (and managed services) help tame multi-cloud networking?

It's clear that there is a real problem that needs to be addressed for many enterprises. Coevolve can help in three major areas, with more to follow soon. Each of these capabilities can help enterprises in different ways - let's take a look:

1. Extending our management inside the cloud environments

As the network environments within the cloud providers gets more complex, simply deploying an SD-WAN edge at the front door is no longer enough. In the last few months we have established ourselves as an Azure Networking MSP Partner to help address this challenge, and relationships with additional cloud providers are coming soon. This lets us perform two critical tasks. First, we can publish offers on the Azure Marketplace, allowing existing Azure clients to have visibility of the managed services we can offer in their environment:

Second, we can use the Azure Lighthouse portal to allow clients to delegate management of just the networking portion of their Azure environment to Coevolve. We can coexist with existing management of the virtual compute, storage, databases and other services the client may have in place. This lets our team configure routing, subnets, segmentation, inter-region communication and other advanced networking functionality in the environment.

We're exploring similar capabilities with other cloud providers to enable this form of delegated management access to only the networking components - this functionality is critical to reducing the friction associated with multiple parties managing different components of the cloud environments.

2. Managing inter-region networking in cloud provider networks

As I wrote in this article about cloud providers potentially being able to replace traditional MPLS backbones, we are seeing a material increase in enterprises using the backbones of the cloud providers themselves, rather than traditional telco networks. The functionality and maturity of these products continues to improve. Most of the major cloud service providers now have high-performance inter-region connectivity capabilities as part of their cloud offerings. Azure Virtual WAN, AWS Transit Gateway and Google Cloud Interconnect are some examples of the products that can facilitate completely new backbone topologies.

Coevolve works with enterprises to incorporate the use of these types of products in new architectures where appropriate, and can then manage the traffic flows over these backbones on behalf of the client. We have seen many examples of significant cost benefits associated with moving away from traditional telco networks to using cloud provider backbones in this way.

3. Integrating innovative multi-cloud technology partners

Solving the inter-provider connectivity in a multi-cloud environment is much more challenging than delivering reliable intra-provider networks. Coevolve recently partnered with multi-cloud networking startup Alkira to address this challenge. Alkira provides an on-demand multi-cloud network, allowing the enterprise to securely connect users and workloads across multiple cloud providers.

This capability allows us to build networks that seamlessly extend across multiple cloud providers, without having to manually create integrations between each one. We believe many global enterprises will benefit from this solution to deliver improved performance, security and visibility across their cloud environments.

Where do we go next?

We continue to invest in automation and machine learning as we enhance our managed network services. Multi-cloud environments open up many more possibilities for improving performance between regions, and we believe we can play an important role in using this capability to deliver real business benefit. Our history as a business has been mostly focused on the edge, using telco-independent SD-WAN and innovative underlay options to replace legacy infrastructure. Moving forward, we will continue to find ways to differentiate our capabilities in the core as multi-cloud adoption grows. We look forward to discussing this topic further - if you think Coevolve can help in any way please don't hesitate to contact me here, on Twitter at @CRoche or via the Coevolve website.