Multicloud networking: Integrating your AWS accounts

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is probably one of the most well-known and utilized cloud (and soon to be on-prem) solutions providers. In addition to its technical robustness and market reach, enterprise businesses can rely on its proven reliability, metered billing and multitude of partner solutions.

When it comes to multicloud network environments, two questions occupy the minds of decisions makers:

• When do you utilize cloud?
• How do you maintain network health and integrity while utilizing cloud resources?

In this post, we present a few possible scenarios where synchronizing AWS resources with your on-prem corporate network is beneficial, as well as what to look for when evaluating the implementation.

When do you need AWS integration?

AWS, and cloud services in general are an attractive option to modernize and extend corporate networks and IT, providing resource availability at scale. Here are a few scenarios where Men&Mice customers are using AWS.

• Mergers and acquisitions create fast and immediate demand for resource scaling or consolidation. Both for incorporating newly acquired networks and migrating them
• Project fragmentation, which benefits from a dynamically available pool of resources, as well as self-service, keeps management overhead low and minimizes bottlenecks.
• Physical expansions, whether new local offices and data centers or diverse geographies, enterprises take advantage of locally available resources or factor network architecture to reduce latency and increase performance.
• Network diversification to prevent against DDoS and other malicious attacks.

Dynamic cloud in the slower moving enterprise

Enterprise businesses have developed networking practices to mitigate downtime and more frequently than ever, prevent against attacks. Starting from small-scale on-prem installations to utilizing large-scale private data centers, then cloud, diversifying the network supply chain is as mandatory as maintaining different logistics providers or materials suppliers.

More often than not, regulatory oversight also dictates much of what can and cannot be done. That presents an obstacle enterprise businesses have to consider or work around, particularly with regard to onboarding and utilizing cloud.

How to utilize AWS?

AWS and Amazon Route53 for DNS address the growing need for networking resources management in the cloud. But even Amazon recognizes the importance of visibility across an entire network setup,  introducing last fall the Route 53 Resolver for Hybrid Clouds, for bi-directional querying between on-prem and AWS.

This is exceptional news for AWS customers, particularly customers of Men&Mice Suite using AWS. Any cloud/multicloud configuration has to work natively, dynamically, and securely if its benefits are to be fully realized, a guiding principle of the development of the Men&Mice Suite.

Natively

Cloud resources offer the most benefits when utilized to their full native extent, and synchronize with on-prem at the same time. Like spreadsheets were to IP Address Management, managing cloud services separately is both inefficient and enables a host of trouble down the line.

Proper multicloud networking needs a single management interface, an overlay,  that natively connects to the cloud and the cloud services’ features while providing complete visibility across the network, down to the management of zones and unification of audit trails.

Dynamically

If provisioning cloud resources is on par with the procurement of new hardware for the on-premise infrastructure, what’s the point? Scaling up or down using the cloud is an attractive concept, but unless it’s also easy to implement, adapt  and migrate when needs change, much of the benefit is lost.

Dynamic resources require, beyond native integration, a programmable and automated interface, capitalizing on APIs to simplify processes and retain security configurations.

Securely

It's critical to network security to have the ability to enforce the same property structure and protocols for network entities, regardless of whether across multiple cloud platforms, accounts or on-prem, to ensure adherence to corporate standards for network and IP provisioning. Likewise, retention of access controls, and complete visibility in network audit trails is equally important.

Your IP infrastructure management software has to be able to handle management, synchronization and reporting, cohesively, authoritatively and securely.

Utilizing Men&Mice with AWS

Overlay solutions, such as the multicloud-enabled Men&Mice Suite, alleviate these management, visibility and portability concerns.

The Men&Mice Suite comes with

• native integration with IPAM and DNS residing in AWS and Amazon Route 53
• replication and synchronization of multiple DNS zones through xDNS Redundancy™
• an easy-to-use, web-based graphical interface for management of the entire multicloud network and a single compatible API layer for automation,
• enterprise-grade security feature set and granular, role-based access controls.
• Multi-account management of AWS accounts or an AWS account with multiple child accounts (note: upgrade to Men&Mice Suite 9.2 required for this feature).

The Men&Mice Suite keeps the chief advantages of multicloud networking (heterogenization of resources) while maintaining a homogenized management overview.

More clouds

What happens when your network is fairly homogenous — like, say, relying mostly on Cisco, Linux or Microsoft servers on-prem? When looking into cloud solutions, what are your deciding factors? Does multicloud help minimize latency across specific global operations? Can you increase diversity in your network infrastructure supply chain and mitigate security risks simultaneously?

The short answer is yes. We'll dive more into these topics in the next few posts.