Today, your customers operate their IT infrastructure and run applications across many cloud environments. They continue to invest in cloud for easy deployment, flexibility, cost management and performance. Nearly all organizations have embraced a multi-cloud strategy – 93% according to Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report. The pandemic sped up transformation initiatives, and technology partners should capitalize on migrations and improving experience. If you have not downloaded it yet, be sure to get The Cloud Journey Guide for insights on how to maximize demand.
With business workloads dispersed across multiple clouds, employees and customers alike can experience troublesome bottlenecking and slow application performance, failing to achieve top functionality and maximum capabilities. Latency is a major pain point for network engineers. Poor WAN performance can be challenging for any organization, as it involves infrastructure that is outside their direct control. Choosing the right WAN solution can make a significant impact as companies increase the number of users connecting to cloud applications, datacenters and other critical business resources.
Supporting Multi-Cloud Strategy
Businesses commonly utilize different cloud services for a multitude of reasons: support their business applications and workloads, capitalize on potential cost-savings, maximize employee and customer experience, maintain overall performance or meet any necessary industry or geographic requirements. Having multiple cloud environments can be a lot to manage, but also adds to considerations when deploying new solutions. Plus, there is the pressing burden of always maintaining the highest level of security, an even greater challenge when you’re talking about multiple workloads being accessed across multiple clouds and with any on-prem workloads.
Assess your customer’s current IT setup before providing recommendations, be sure to pull TBI’s Tech Gurus into the conversation, offering greater expert insight and additional sales support. Solution engineers and architects are available for customer meetings; click here to learn more or book time.
SD-WAN Solutions
SD-WAN is a viable solution for multi-cloud customers looking to simplify WAN infrastructure while saving on connectivity. SD-WAN offers the ability to mix private and public connectivity, so IT teams can match business-critical applications with highly reliable connectivity, while using less reliable connectivity for secondary applications. This can significantly increase productivity and cut down on connectivity costs. Additionally, businesses can increase reliability by combining private connectivity with public internet connections, so traffic can be rerouted as necessary, bringing fast failover capabilities.
SD-WAN offers automation capabilities and the ability to adequately support rapidly evolving cloud networks. Your customers can take advantage of direct connections, using the most optimized links to support their various applications and workloads, while decreasing performance issues caused by too much traffic on the network. The important thing when advising your customers on SD-WAN solutions is ensuring that you are meeting necessary cloud capacity and as always – security is a factor.
An effective SD-WAN solution provides application-friendly network infrastructure working across a multi-cloud environment, creating uniformity, improving management and instilling cost controls. There are different considerations when recommending the right SD-WAN solution to properly support your customer’s multi-cloud strategy. Here are some tips:
- Find a cloud-native solution that can integrate across the customer’s cloud infrastructure. This will help with management, configurations and connectivity across multiple cloud networks.
- Look for security features like next gen firewalls (NGFW) baked into the SD-WAN solution. You want to always be conscious of security and eliminating vulnerabilities.
- Identify solutions that meet all cloud requirements and application-aware capabilities to mitigate any bandwidth or performance issues. Ideally, the solution should allow traffic prioritization and the ability to manage connections based on business need.
- Centralized, real-time network visibility across multiple cloud applications gives consolidated data to control bandwidth and offer advanced threat detection and preventability. This is especially necessary for customers with compliance requirements and industry regulations.
- Review direct connections to major cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure utilized by the customer to guarantee service availability. Providing direct data transport to these services delivers lower latencies and packet loss by avoiding the internet.
- Download TBI’s SD-WAN Provider Comparison Guide for a complete comparison of providers, breaking down differentiators and how their features stack up again each other.
After gaining an understanding of the customer’s complete IT landscape, you should approach with appropriate SD-WAN solutions to improve their cloud connectivity as well as security. Get the latest SD-WAN Toolkit for a free eBook on selling SD-WAN, targeting the right customers and offering the best solutions from top providers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
As a Senior Marketing Manager at TBI, Stephani spearheads campaign strategy and marketing programs designed to drive awareness around emerging technologies and generate demand amongst our providers. Her primary focus is to support and help develop business units at TBI including Omni Center, Channel Sales Enablement, Partner Referral Program and Tech Guidance. You can reach Stephani at sfitzsimmons@tbicom.com or connect on LinkedIn.
