Overcoming Complexity in a Multi-Cloud Network Environment

Background

A transportation company with more than $1 billion in annual revenue had deployed an extensive network to support their global reach. Their experienced, ten-person networking team was stretched in supporting a consistent cloud environment across two different cloud providers, multiple on-premises data centers, and expanded regions. In addition, the need for consistency in network operations across environments led to ongoing integration challenges with existing solutions for firewalling, load-balancing and remote access. As a result, the team had fragmented visibility across their entire network, and ongoing change management was cumbersome and labor intensive. They were struggling to manage the many time and skill requirements placed on their networking team given the specialized and unique knowledge required to manage across multiple cloud providers, as well as their on-premises and virtual networks.

Overcoming the Complexity of Cloud Networking

Migrating network infrastructure to the cloud comes with promises and expectations for easier management and resource efficiency. Yet, this company, like many, ran into some unforeseen challenges as their network became more diverse once they were relying on more than one cloud provider as well as continuing to have some resources on-premises.

First, designing new cloud network footprints required new and specialized knowledge. They wanted a consistent approach to cloud network design that would build on their existing domain expertise and more readily enable a cross-team capability instead of siloed expertise. Furthermore they needed a consistent, best practice approach to incorporate their preselected 3rd party virtualized network functions (VNFs), like next-generation firewalls (NGFW) and load balancers. At the same time, minimizing disruption to their business stakeholders who were dependent on current network operations and reporting was essential.

Then, deploying each new cloud environment was a very manual process, taking significant time. They needed a repeatable and automated process to deploy and then maintain their defined network architectures. They also wanted to start quickly without needing to integrate a complex automation framework at the outset. Once deployed, they found that the visibility they had natively from the cloud providers was limited and differed in each cloud. They needed a single place from which they could visualize their network topology, health and performance across the disparate environments, to efficiently deliver network and security capabilities to the business.

Why Nefeli?

Nefeli’s NetOps SaaS solution provides a scalable and affordable way to simplify and automate network design, deployment and operations tasks in a distributed environment, while maintaining and integrating with the customer’s preferred best-in-class virtual network functions, such as next-generation firewalls and application load balancing. Nefeli delivers a unified abstraction that produces a single location to connect, configure, monitor and manage the disparate parts of the network; leveraging both the cloud provider's 1st-party native network functions, and 3rd-party best-in-class virtual functions as needed.

With Nefeli, the company also gains:

• A solution that works seamlessly within their existing network operations and can scale easily over time. Nefeli reinforces, supports and integrates with the security infrastructure they already had in place.
• Visibility to the health, performance, and cost of the distributed network, from within a single portal.
• Greater ease-of-use through normalizing network operations tasks to minimize specialized skill set requirements.
• Automated replication of production and disaster recovery (DR) environments when needed, complementing compute and storage site recovery software.
• Usage-based pricing delivered via a scalable subscription based service that can grow and retract to cost-effectively meet the company’s needs over time.