The era of traditional networks is over. Increasingly, business services and customer experiences are delivered through the cloud. Users connect to cloud services via multiple devices, while applications are run on distributed infrastructure made possible by cloud computing. Traditional networks — with physical computers, servers, routers and switches — can no longer deliver the speed, scalability, reliability or security that cloud computing requires.
Cloud networking provides access to virtualized infrastructure – routers, firewalls, bandwidth and management software — required for building, managing and optimizing networks. By automating functions such as maintenance, updating and patching, virtual networks can run more efficiently while scaling with ease. Cloud security policies can be deployed easily and enforced across the network, and network reliability can be significantly improved.
But as enterprises adopt Cloud networking solutions and other elastic cloud technologies, IT teams are faced with a Cloud management problem. With each new cloud platform, IT administrators must use a different set of tools for managing and configuring services, making it difficult to toggle between environments efficiently and securely. Migrating workloads between platforms becomes far more complicated, causing migrations that should take hours or days to last weeks or months instead. As a result, enterprises are missing out on the benefits that drew them to cloud services initially.
