Establishing connective tissue between multiple clouds and data centers – Cisco Blogs

Co-Authored by Eugene Vakulenko, Engineering Product Manager, Cisco

One Size Does Not Fit All

Gone are the days of lift-and-shift cloud migrations. As countless companies have learned, there’s too much complexity, too many options, and no such thing as a one-size-fits-all panacea.

As a result, “hybrid” and “multicloud” IT operations have moved from trendy buzzwords to enterprise realities, and I think it’s safe to say most companies are still getting used to this new reality.

Realities of Meeting Existing and New Needs

Take Skanska Construction, for instance. One of the world’s leading construction and project development companies, Skanska was initially planning to migrate all of their applications to the cloud. But it was a poor fit for their legacy workloads, and there were other factors that precluded a wholesale lift-and-shift.

Like many before them, Skanska soon found themselves managing a data center, public cloud environment, disaster recovery site, and a diversity of workloads spread among them. It became unsustainable, and they wanted better visibility, consistency, and control across all of their computing domains.

Some might say companies like Skanska need a virtual glue that brings disparate environments together. But glue is a binder, and companies need to maintain choice and flexibility in a hybrid, multicloud world.

Reducing the Burdens

Perhaps it’s semantics, but I’d argue companies need something more organic, extensible, and adaptable than a hardened glue. They need a connective tissue between multiple clouds and data centers, and that’s exactly what software-defined networking (SDN) solutions like Cisco ACI and Cisco Cloud ACI provide.

By abstracting overarching intent from underlying constructs – which are different for every cloud and on-prem environment – SDN dramatically reduces the burden and complexity of managing multiple discrete domains. And software-defined policies not only provide the automation and consistency necessary to place workloads anywhere, but also to quickly and easily move them if and when needed.

Computing environments and priorities are different for every company, but in a hybrid and multicloud world, connective tissue has become a universal need.

Learn More

To learn how Skanska is stretching its data center network to the cloud with Cisco Cloud ACI, watch the video and read the full case study.

Resources

●        Data Center and Cloud Networking customer stories

●        Data Center and Cloud Networking solutions

●        Cisco Cloud ACI

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