CLOSER LOOK CLOUD WAN, SD-WAN, AND CLOUD NATIVE NETWORKING

Cloud-native networking is all about providing access to the never-ending pools of resources that now reside in the cloud. While we hear the term cloud computing pretty often and know what it means, cloud-native networking sometimes sounds unfamiliar at best. This is because while most of us are used to the network appearing out of thin air to provide connectivity, what we don’t see are the wheels turning behind the curtains that make this possible. Signing up to use cloud resources without properly planning for the required network demands is a lot like building a city without roads. Several organizations have gone down this road already and figured out only too late that neglecting networking resources is a critical mistake. Cloud-native networking provides users with the proper network capacity to fully make use of the clouds features and benefits, without which, migrating to the cloud is pretty pointless. Similarly, Google has Interconnect and Azure has an express route, in addition to the newly announced Microsoft Azure Networking MSP Program, a push to improve connectivity into their environments. According to Yousef Khalidi, corporate vice president of Azure Networking for Microsoft, the new program aims at enabling other partners and network carriers to leverage their own networking capabilities with Azures own expanding range of networking tools. There are also several independent network-as-a service providers like Datapath.io, Aviatrix. Masergy and Aryaka, and these actually tend to be easier to scale and run across clouds since they’re not tied to any particular public cloud. NS1, the leader in next-generation DNS and traffic management solutions, just announced the acquisition of network performance optimization technologies from Datapath.io. NS1 customers will be able to take advantage of the always-on optimization as well as the dedicated full-mesh connectivity across cloud regions and providers immediately, with no additional setup or configuration.