Carrier Ethernet for Private Cloud Service Delivery
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Posted on: Jul 14, 2014
Reprinted with permission from Skinny Wire, Volume VII, Issue 1
Today, the Internet is the predominant wide area network (WAN) used to deliver cloud services. Interestingly, little attention has been paid to the WAN by the cloud community. Their main focus has been on cloud infrastructure and services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) and networking within the data center. However, large enterprises are hesitant to move their mission-critical applications to the cloud when delivered over the Internet.
Challenges and factors limiting enterprise cloud service delivery over the Internet include:
- Security
- Network Performance (SLA)
- Data Governance
- Regulatory Compliance
When enterprises consider moving their applications to the cloud, the WAN becomes an important part of that decision process. They need to consider the WAN’s availability, consistency of QoS performance and security vulnerabilities – all of which could impact business continuity. Furthermore, in order to meet regulatory compliance and data governance requirements, the enterprise’s cloud-based data may need to reside physically within a specific country. This is difficult to achieve using the public Internet.
With public cloud services, anyone with an Internet connection can purchase and use the service. This makes it very difficult for the enterprise’s IT department to manage data leakage or conform to governmental information privacy requirements such as those defined in the Health Insurance Portability and Accounting Act (HIPAA) or the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB) in the United States.
To meet their requirements, enterprises often look to stand up their cloud environment in their own data centers or outsourced to a third party private cloud service provider (often referred to as virtual private cloud). A private or virtual private WAN is the preferred choice to interconnect the enterprise locations with the data center housing their cloud infrastructure.
Carrier Ethernet continues to be one of the fastest growing WAN services for enterprise business connectivity and is a natural fit for delivery of private cloud services. Carrier Ethernet enables new and more flexible ways to interconnect data centers and interconnect enterprise cloud consumers to their cloud service providers. MEF-defined Carrier Ethernet service types, namely, E-Line, E-LAN, E-Tree and E-Access, provide a broad range of connectivity options that provide flexibility to meet different deployment scenarios.
Carrier Ethernet provides different benefits for each stakeholder in the cloud service ecosystem. Carrier Ethernet enables Cloud Service Providers to deliver private cloud services that can differentiate their public cloud offerings which are becoming commoditized due to the dominant position of Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
Ethernet service providers can position their Carrier Ethernet services to focus more on the end-user applications instead of simply generic connectivity services. Ethernet service providers can leverage their well-established, trusted relationship with their enterprise subscribers to deliver private cloud solutions through internal offerings or partnerships with 3rd-party cloud service providers.
Finally, Carrier Ethernet puts the enterprise IT department in control of users accessing the private cloud services enabling them to meet the organization’s security policies, data governance and regulatory requirement while meeting the application requirements for QoS performance and high availability.