Key Highlights
- Networking teams have been challenged to offer hybrid workers secure access to cloud-based applications.
- They are looking for greater automation and additional visibility tools to help them manage diverse enterprise workloads.
The key findings of the new Global Hybrid Cloud Trends report of Cisco surveyed include 2,500 IT decision makers in 13 countries to discern the trends and priorities of organizations managing workloads across multiple private, public cloud, and edge computing environments.
Cisco said the report looks at how the multicloud environments impact network operations. Thomas Scheibe, vice president of product management for Cisco cloud networking, wrote in the report that they found that as businesses adapt to the changing environment, IT priorities are shifting.
He stated that for the first time, agility and business performance had overtaken cost and network management as the key concerns for IT teams, with 42% of respondents citing a more graceful development environment as their main reason for moving to multiple clouds.
At the same time, organizations are grappling with unprecedented levels of complexity and uncertainty, fueling a search for simplicity and security.
What Does Cisco Say About Network Complexity?
Cisco stated that network complexity multiplies as endpoints and applications become more dispersed and distributed. While the public cloud adoption is growing, 50% of workloads are still deployed on-premise. As a result, most environments will continue to be a mix of public, hosted, private, edge, and on-premises environments.
Regarding networking cloud-native deployments, the most challenging issue per the survey respondents is securing microservices traffic, cited by 34%. The other top difficulties of deploying networks that support cloud-native environments are:
- Self-service provisioning and change management (32%)
- Automating network workflows (32%)
- Visibility and control (31%)
- Manage migrations (31%)
- Integrating DevOps processes (29%)
- Integrating microservices (28%)
- APIs for network automation (28%)
- Remote interconnect for microservices (28%)
IT teams are looking for assistance since the complexity of these environments has become such a challenge. According to Cisco, orchestration, automation, and visibility technologies have become some of the most-wanted tools for handling multicloud environments.
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About SDN Technology
Software-defined networking (SDN) technology is developed as one of the top options (cited by 48%) to help companies manage distributed workloads.
Daryl Coon, product marketing manager with Cisco Networking, said that SDN is a means of accessing network automation and insights. It is a way to scale and secure networking environments and simplify the process of making changes.
At a basic level, it moves from a box-by-box approach to a more systemic management process. Many principles and methods apply to campus/enterprise and multicloud environments. The added complexity comes from obtaining visibility across environments an organization doesn’t own to manage, automate and gain insights.
Coon said that SDN is important for multicloud environments. Organizations need to abstract the network to simplify IT. SDN is foundational for capabilities such as letting automation software push the business intent/ policy out and enforce it, dynamically moving traffic to an optimal path, or proactively alerting IT when issues impact users or applications.
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