Welcome to the new normal: A global economy where businesses of all sizes rely on the public cloud for mission-critical applications and resources. The data center dam has broken, applications and services sprawl the digital ecosystem, and IT teams must ensure proper access to intellectual property and resources.
Recently, a Deloitte Insights Tech Trends 2023 report declared most businesses (85%) use two or more cloud platforms, and a quarter of all businesses use five or more cloud platforms. That’s because as companies across the globe rely more heavily on cloud technology to power their businesses, many opt for multiple providers to meet their unique needs. In 2023, this shouldn't be surprising.
What does catch enterprises off guard is how to securely connect Customers, Partners, and Third Parties in the new sprawling digital frontier. Extranet has been a known quantity for organizations historically. With today's ecosystem, Extranet looks like something completely different. Taking a DIY approach spanning MPLS circuits, firewalls, load balancers, and cloud providers presents significant security gaps and may introduce unnecessary risk and cost. What is the next progression of Extranet that will give enterprises a competitive advantage in their respective markets?
Enter Extranet as a Service (EaaS) and the importance of a modernized network built for the cloud to deliver it.
A cloud networking revolution is underway
Enterprises are eager to leverage the power of cloud computing - in an optimized and cost-efficient way. But even the savviest organizations struggle to do this at enterprise scale because public cloud networking operations can become enormously complex, with each cloud environment requiring unique tooling, design, and configuration patterns. Sometimes problems are solved by employing a piecemeal approach over many years. Other problems can be solved be a design that takes the culmination of problems gathered over time and offers a purpose-based solution.
This is where EaaS comes in. The new design paradigm aims to make this a standard planning exercise for enterprises leveraging multiple public cloud providers to connect customers, partners, and third parties to critical business data at the enterprise scale, all while maintaining the utmost control, visibility, and security. As enterprises shift to EaaS, optimizations become business as usual. Using what you have in the most efficient way possible comes built into the design. Having a unified approach for Visibility and Partner/Third-Party connectivity is the outcome. All while providing the right policy, segmentation, and isolation.
What to look for in EaaS
As organizations see their infrastructure spanning on-premises and multi-cloud, what should they look for in an EaaS Solution to facilitate end-to-end visibility, shared services, and advanced B2B Extranet connectivity?
Here are four of the attributes CIOs, CISOs and networking architects should look for:
- Resiliency: At its core, the solution should be highly-available and resilient to failures
- Scalability: Demand for resources may be low or high. The solution should scale with demand and be in geographical proximity to consumers
- Security: Intelligent segmentation that lends itself to business composition and network operations
- Flexibility: Meet businesses where they are today; Provide practical access controls for customers, partners, end-users, and third parties
While the first three points may be obvious, the last is not. Why is flexibility necessary? The large networks that practitioners are responsible for in the enterprise have evolved and transformed. They are constructed using various hardware/software vendors, design patterns, and integrations. These designs have flooded outside the data center world, making B2B Extranet connectivity a daunting and complicated task. Having measures of flexibility that simplify partner connectivity and work with the vendors, your partner is using while making the experience and reliability excellent is a daunting task. Approaching your Extranet with EaaS strategically can give your business and its partners a competitive advantage.
Leveraging the full power of the cloud
Cloud Service Providers have put extensive CAPEX into ensuring their infrastructure is highly available worldwide. Leveraging an EaaS solution built atop Hyperscale Infrastructure creates the unique ability to leverage that scale as needed. Instead of shouldering the network architecture, design, security, and scale, your engineers can focus on outcomes. If your business is Financial Services, this means your engineers can focus less on hardware vendors, supply chain shortages, refreshes, and support and more on what Partners can access.
Time, staffing, and deadlines are challenging areas to measure and forecast for businesses today. This is where the buy rather than build approach becomes so compelling. Technology never affords us a zero-sum approach here. It is usually a combination across all technology verticals. When something like EaaS comes along and simplifies infrastructure and operations, it's worth it to give it a deeper look. One of the great things about "as-a-service" solutions today is how easily an organization can POC, prototype, and evaluate them. This typically comes at no cost to the consumer.
With increased reliance on cloud services, companies of all sizes can take advantage of the reliability, scalability, security, and cost efficiency of using an advanced EaaS to streamline operations. EaaS provides enterprises with improved operational agility, with solid yet flexible network architecture optimized for efficient partner communication across disparate geographic locations and cloud environments.
