How Partners Can Use SD-WAN to Reduce Multicloud Complexities

Jon Bove

New, long-term remote work requirements have customers increasingly turning to multicloud cloud solutions to support their business needs.

This new strategy offers several benefits. Unfortunately, many customers can become quickly overwhelmed by the tools and resources required to secure these expanded networks. This is especially so when business needs span multiple cloud environments. For partners, this presents an ideal opportunity to support cloud-to-cloud network deployments for their customers using a secure software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN).

A secure SD-WAN solution enables partners to help their customers reduce complexity, increase cost efficiency, improve application performance and implement a single, integrated security strategy that can span their multicloud-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. This enables customer IT teams to build seamless networks that support their remote work initiatives. At the same time they’ll maintain security across even the most complex multicloud-cloud environments.

Challenges Customers Face with Cloud Networking

While a multicloud cloud networking strategy has undoubted benefits, such as efficiencies for building, accessing and managing applications, it can also present several management challenges for organizations. As a partner, it’s essential that you understand these challenges. Then, up can design and propose security solutions that meet the unique, individual needs of your customers.

Below are some of the main obstacles that organizations often face when adopting a multicloud-cloud strategy:           

Increased network complexity. Implementing multicloud-cloud capabilities can be difficult. That’s because it requires customers to not only deploy a variety of technologies across their networks, but many of these solutions function differently depending on the cloud platform on which they’re installed. If organizations don’t have a DevOps team with security experience handling the deployment, they can expose themselves to security risks. In fact, Gartner claims that as much as 95% of all cloud security issues are the result of misconfigurations. The current skills gap compounds this challenge. Many organizations are unable to hire and retain qualified security specialists, especially those with cloud expertise. Without a consistent security infrastructure that spans multiple cloud environments, that can be centrally managed, and ensures consistent policy orchestration and enforcement, organizations lack the end-to-end visibility needed to secure their increasingly complex cloud networks.           

Additional Challenges

High cost and inconsistent performance. Moving to the cloud requires dynamic IPs with dedicated backhaul connections to route network traffic between on-premise and cloud environments. Routing traffic in this way can be expensive, and is often a barrier to entry for smaller customers. On top of that, if you don’t integrate these connections with a customer’s existing network infrastructure, it can lead to bottlenecks and limited application performance.

Compliance risk. Meeting existing and emerging compliance requirements is already challenging. And, for a number of reasons it’s even more so in a multicloud-cloud environment. To start, it can be difficult to understand the shared responsibility model. Many customers assume that once their data is in the cloud, it’s the cloud providers’ responsibility to maintain …