Organizations are shifting workloads to the hybrid cloud, merging on-premises infrastructure with public cloud services such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Enterprise IT teams are delivering on-premises IT services with the speed and operational efficiency of public cloud services by shifting to hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions from companies like Nutanix. Hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures can provide many advantages, including greater speed to market, elastic scalability, and lower capital expense. However, these environments can introduce challenges that may undermine those advantages.
One of these challenges is managing core network services. These services include Domain Name System (DNS), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and IP Addresses Management (IPAM) and are collectively known as DDI. DDI enables connectivity to all web destinations and web-based applications.
Many organizations that are adopting the hybrid and multi-cloud model are discovering that they are unable to consistently manage DDI services across that diverse infrastructure. Specific challenges are:
- Lack of automation. Most IT organizations manage DDI services manually, including across cloud vendor deployments, resulting in potential service delays, slower application deployments and higher costs for human resources.
- Poor visibility. Private and public cloud solutions typically provide inadequate visibility into DNS and IP addresses, which can lead to chronic struggles with device management, network speed and availability, and security.
- No centralized DDI management. Private and public cloud platforms do not enable organizations to centrally administer DDI in diverse network deployments, which can make managing devices, virtual machines (VMs) and other network assets more time consuming, error prone and expensive.
IT organizations can overcome these pitfalls using DDI solutions designed for integration with hybrid clouds and HCI. Earmarks of these solutions include:
- No manual processes. Organizations can automatically provision and deprovision DNS records to eliminate manual steps. The best cloud-enabled DDI solutions also integrate with multiple network automation and orchestration solutions to maximize agility, reducing the time it takes to perform common networking tasks from hours and days to minutes or seconds.
- Reduced blind spots. With consolidated visibility into DDI services, networking teams can more easily discover, track, and secure devices and VMs no matter where they are located—on-premises, outside the network, in virtualized data centers, or in the cloud.
- Increase network availability and scalability. Integrated DDI platforms should provide redundancy of network services for every cloud instance at every location, enabling high availability across the network along with local survivability for branch locations, while enabling elastic scalability of DDI services to support network expansion.
Hybrid and multi-cloud deployments continue to be a priority for enterprise IT and the adoption is likely to accelerate. The promise of better agility will continue to require greater automation, visibility, control and reliability. Platforms that integrate and consolidate core network services across on-premises, private and public clouds will let organizations reap the benefits of their cloud initiatives.
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