Several parallel trends have impacted consumer behaviour over the last decade, including a shift in remote working culture, widespread digital transformation, and an increasing reliance on cloud connectivity. As hybrid networks have grown, applications have moved from enterprise data centres to private and public clouds. This has led to the widespread adoption of cloud-to-cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud connectivity models due to their ability to improve performance, scalability, and cost by leveraging best-of-breed platforms from cloud providers.
These trends underscore a crucial need: to support a seamless global network, organisations must be able to create high-speed and low-latency connections to major cloud providers. This is where cloud-ready networks come into play. By providing reliable, scalable, and secure networks designed specifically for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, cloud-ready networks answer the key questions of modern-day networking.
How can cloud-ready networks solve common business challenges?
And what, exactly, does “cloud readiness” mean in the context of enterprise networks?
In a nutshell, a cloud-ready network offers three key advantages that most traditional networks do not:
- Secure and direct connections between data centres, leading public cloud providers and the Internet
- A unified architecture that combines essential network and security services, integrating cloud connectivity, SD-WAN, security, and global Internet within a single cloud platform
- Flexible pay-as-you-go management and billing options to simplify network operations
Regardless of industry or market, the leading business challenge for enterprises today is delivering rich, reliable, and cost-effective cloud application experiences to their users. To fulfil this need, they must be able to easily create quick, secure, and automated connections to all environments where their applications and data reside. And this—in the context of hyper-competitive global markets and high-speed connectivity standards—makes cloud-ready networks a must-have instead of just a nice-to-have.
Why work with a cloud-ready network specialist?
The process of building a cloud-ready network can be complex, requiring deep domain expertise, solid infrastructure, and local regulatory support. As a global managed service provider, Singtel can help. Singtel offers tailored expertise and technology to help businesses.
- On-demand secure cloud connectivity
Cloud-ready networks must provide secure, dependable, and guaranteed connections between enterprise networks, data centres, and leading cloud providers
- On-demand connections to multiple clouds through a single service portal
- Centralised and extended visibility into all cloud networks
- All-in-one integration of essential capabilities like enhanced Internet service, optimised routing to local service providers, performance monitoring, and path visualisation
- Robust visibility, security, and control
Liquid-XTM leverages software-based virtual network functions (VNFs) services to combine networking and security services via a single centralised platform. For organisations, this integrated approach offers three core advantages:
- The ability to immediately detect and resolve performance issues and maintain high levels of network and cloud resilience when entrusting business-critical applications and workloads to multiple clouds
- Simplification of network architecture, cost-optimisation, and flexible billing through usage-based VNF-as-a-service (VNFaaS) models that can integrate functions like SD-WAN, WAN optimisation, and security capabilities into a centralised universal customer premises equipment (uCPE)
- A tightly integrated underlay and overlay with built-in visibility capabilities for monitoring Internet performance and traffic paths. Effective overlay-underlay integration enhances cross-system visibility and application performance, ensuring consistent Internet quality across the entire network.
- Enhanced flexibility and scalability
Enterprises have increasingly embraced network-as-a-service (NaaS) solutions to manage multi-cloud environments more effectively. Cloud-ready networks operate on a NaaS model, where vendors provide specialised networking capabilities that customers can operate through self-service portals without having to maintain their own networking infrastructure.
Singtel’s Liquid-XTM uses this approach to unify key features like traffic management, enhanced cloud connectivity, global Internet, SD-WAN, and security under a single umbrella. This provides 3 key benefits:
- Increased flexibility, lower hardware reliance, and reduced operational expenditure due to pay-as-you-go billing and the ability to scale bandwidth dynamically
- Lowered internal resource budgets and faster time-to-market using on-demand provisioning that allows IT teams to offload expertise and/or infrastructure-dependent functionality to their cloud-ready network specialist for faster turnaround times
- Lowered capital expenses and improved scalability when it comes to spinning up new custom-built cloud-ready networks. By outsourcing the bulk of heavy lifting for the network to an expert partner, companies can acquire successful custom networks that fit their unique budgetary, performance, and support requirements.
- Global expansion within complex regulatory environments
Growing companies expect to expand globally. The right move can create inroads into new markets, customers, and revenue streams. Businesses expanding into international markets, however, must navigate unique challenges:
- Different regions adopt different approaches to privacy and data protection laws, while fragmented bilateral and multilateral roaming regulations also often exist at regional and country levels.
- The full extent of compliance requirements and lead times can be challenging to assess when enterprises lack an understanding of the key local players, essential prerequisites, and lesser-known rules.
- It is often difficult to ensure consistent network quality in all the regions a company may want to expand to, particularly in remote areas. Some providers lack the necessary local infrastructure, partnerships, and services to interconnect a company’s distributed branches seamlessly.
Recognising these complexities, Singtel helps enterprises navigate diverse regulatory requirements by providing design and deployment services coupled with localised regulatory expertise to manage far-flung global networks effectively.
- Expert implementation and operational support
Building networks from the ground up often requires additional training and human resources from in-house IT staff. However, a cloud-ready network specialist can enable businesses to get up and running in days instead of months.
Furthermore, global expansions typically require businesses to work with local ISPs that may not provide the necessary levels of continuous monitoring and operational support. Using its worldwide network of partnerships with ISPs and networking service providers, Singtel takes this burden off its customers, providing end-to-end SLAs across the entire IT and network infrastructure.
Conclusion
Finding a provider with the expertise to support your growth and modernisation goals is the first step to selecting the right network. With Singtel, you can connect seamlessly to leading cloud providers and data centres, accelerate ongoing transformation efforts, and simplify existing infrastructure for your long-term growth and network sustainability goals.
Read our whitepaper to find out the benefits of a cloud-ready network and the value of partnering with a managed service provider. Learn more here: https://www.singtel.com/business/articles/optimised-networking-for-the-global-business
