Wednesday 18 March 2020

Here’s How Network Architects Can Survive Cloud Transformation

Nauman Mustafa is VP of the solutions engineering and architecture group at Aviatrix. Before joining the company, he was the director and global technology adoption leader at VMware focusing on NSX, SD-WAN, and Kubernetes initiatives. He also worked at Cisco for 12 years, doing everything from data center networking to security to voice, video, and network management. Here are his thoughts on the pitfalls of cloud implementation, the responsibilities of enterprises over their public cloud, and how traditional networking architects can become relevant in the new world of the public cloud.

Why does cloud transformation require enterprises to change their networking strategy and mindset?

The move to cloud for most enterprises has significantly accelerated over the past 12 months. What began as a DevOps-driven sandbox development environment is now serious business, driven top-down from the CEO and board of directors. The status quo is viewed as an existential threat to the businesses and change is driven from the leadership. The center of gravity for enterprise IT has moved out of the data center and into the cloud.

This enterprise move to the public cloud is resulting in fundamental infrastructural changes as well as an enterprise IT mindset. With an on-prem or private cloud, IT had control of most of the infrastructure they were managing. They had full access and architectural power in terms of how things are designed, deployed, and managed on a day-to-day basis. Moving to the public cloud requires them to give up that control of the underlying compute, storage and networking to their IaaS [infrastructure-as-a-service] providers.

This is a huge change in terms of how enterprise computer engineering jobs is operating today. What’s important to understand, though, is even if you are moving to public clouds, the security and networking posture, and SLAs that your business demands are something that enterprises need to dictate themselves. It is considered a shared responsibility between the enterprise and the cloud service provider [CSP] to ensure they have a resilient, secure, scalable and extendable multi-cloud network architecture.

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