We are pleased to offer a guest post from one of our valued cloud providers, iland, to provide insights into how providers are leveraging VMware technologies. This post highlights the importance of connectivity and NSX as part of the VMware Cloud Provider Platform.

By Marc Beder, Global Director, Solution Architecture, iland

When it comes to the cloud, there are a myriad of offerings, endless scale and the promise of cost savings that enable organizations to do more with less. However, when all of these are discussed, there is a very critical element that is not always included in the conversation – connectivity!

Perhaps this seems obvious but to leverage cloud capabilities effectively, customers need to connect to it, but the deeper we dig, the more challenges (and opportunities) we start to uncover.

Driving Opportunities with Cloud Connectivity

Many networking technologies in use today across organizations have been in use since (or at least developed in) the late ‘70s and ‘80s – this is not to say that they are inefficient or outdated, but transferring the network architecture, including protocols, design and security, and seamlessly migrating it to the cloud becomes a challenge.

This is where modern clouds, like the iland Secure Cloud, powered by the VMware Cloud Provider Platform and VMware’s NSX technology helps bridge the gap. By adopting network virtualization, iland is able to offer every customer the ability to replicate the network design they have on-premises today in the cloud – this is by no means an exaggeration.

Whether it be different routing protocols, like BGP or OSPF; high bandwidth throughput, like 1Gbps+; or SSL VPN’s supporting RADIUS authentication with 2-factor authentication, iland provides customers these capabilities natively without the concern of IP address conflicts, unavailability of specific CIDR ranges and other issues which can arise in multi-tenanted VMware cloud platforms.

What these platform-native features also enable customers to do is to move away from legacy networking appliances (physical or virtual) and move to virtual networking with NSX within a modern cloud – not only is this a cost saving (remember that promise of moving to the cloud) but is also a reduction in the complexity of the offering with:

• Less hardware to manage
• Less vendors to liaise with
• Lower MTTR when troubleshooting network related issues

Dynamic Automation

When it comes to the automation of all these networking elements, the good news is that it  can all be built into the platform.

VMware NSX virtualization combined with APIs, like in the iland Secure Cloud, enables customers to quickly deploy networking on-demand and have security policies defined through tags, rather than static configuration. In other words, workloads can be deployed automatically, assigned a tag and aligned with the appropriate security and controls related to that tag, entirely through an API.

Having to manually adjust the network each time a workload is deployed is a thing of the past, as is the need to adjust security controls and configurations for each and every workload, with controls now governed by tags and service definitions.

These are just some of the capabilities that can simplify networking and enable a move to the cloud. Modern clouds, like those in the iland Secure Cloud powered by the VMware Cloud Provider Platform, offer so much more that helps differentiate these clouds and makes them the right cloud choice for customer’s VMware workloads.

Read this iland case study to see how they achieved 75% reduction in capital expenditure with VMware NSX Advanced and NSX Distributed Firewall.

About iland

iland is a global cloud service provider offering secure and compliant hosting for infrastructure (IaaS), disaster recovery (DRaaS), and backup as a service (BaaS). It is recognized by industry analysts as a leader in disaster recovery. The award-winning iland Secure Cloud Console natively combines deep layered security, predictive analytics, and compliance to deliver unmatched visibility and ease of management for all of iland’s cloud services. Headquartered in Houston, London, and Sydney, iland delivers cloud services from its cloud regions throughout North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. Learn more at www.iland.com