Optimizing Cloud Costs

A Joint Technical Webinar with AWS

A global healthcare services company revitalizes delivery of its cloud infrastructure

CASE
STUDY

Key Challenges

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Utilize GCP cloud-native services such as Cloud Interconnect, Cloud Router, and Private Service Connect as an underlay.​

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Manage access to multiple business units accounts in GCP through a single pane of glass.

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Simplify management of stacks and dashboards, while improving visibility of traffic flow between endpoints, VPCs, and accounts across regions and data centers.

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Ensure high-performance traffic encryption for network traffic.

Cloud transit transformation

Prosimo began its discussions with the company by presenting its architecture and isolating core components into two functional buckets: Architecture and Operations.  Design and build operations often take a siloed approach in implementing key network components, yet Prosimo combines connectivity, security, and content delivery into a single operational deployment.  Prosimo calls this “Full-Stack Cloud Transit.” This full-stack enables the Prosimo to execute across three use-cases: Zero-Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Network Transit, and App-to-App Transit.

In enabling connectivity alongside security and content delivery, Prosimo accelerates the delivery of new features or new apps without the operational drag of deploying these functions as separate entities.  The Prosimo Edge delivers Full-Stack Cloud Transit – a network service stack built on Kubernetes managed as IaaS and deployed within any region in minutes. 

Prosimo then discovers and connects to existing cloud-native network functions such as Transit Gateway in AWS.  The “Edge” speaks cloud-native, allowing it to connect to existing cloud-native functions or orchestrate new ones to support application growth.  As a result, Prosimo can insert itself as a service – non-disruptively – within any brown or greenfield deployment.

Prosimo’s architecture empowered the global biotech organization with unprecedented agility and flexibility in designing their cloud infrastructure.  Furthermore, build operations were streamlined by eliminating Layer 3 policies, IPAM planning, and virtual appliance configuration (OS validation, pen-testing, etc.). 

When combined with the ability to discover VPCs, subnets, and application endpoints, the biotech’s architecture team could move faster than a conventional solution based on physical “rack and stack” architecture.  They were also free of the lifecycle management burden: inevitable maintenance windows for patching, software upgrades, and reboots.

Only a cloud-native network solution can move as
fast or be as resilient as cloud-native workloads.

Upleveling operations

Many solutions focus primarily on architecture, while day-to-day operations remain an afterthought.  Prosimo goes further than other solutions by collecting telemetry from network segments while measuring application response times.  This differentiates a high-latency network segment from a slow-to-respond application.  Prosimo then enriches that telemetry by assigning an App Experience score to each user-to-app session.  This score and its associated telemetry provide a picture of individual user experiences that gives context to how network and application performance impact them.  The company highlighted this as a critical factor when evaluating Prosimo against other solutions – the company needed to see where and how productivity was affected for high-priority users and apps.

When network operations teams can more easily identify problems, resolutions happen faster.  For the healthcare services company, consuming telemetry and delivering solutions at scale still presented a challenge even for a fully staffed NOC.  Prosimo ML works with the cloud-native flexibility and the rich telemetry of the cloud transit fabric to provide daily recommendations to improve performance or cut costs.  Recommendations can be deployed with a mouse click, and the network is refactored in minutes without impact on data path operations; for a global organization that maintained substantial on-prem infrastructure, removing operational overhead from multicloud – with an option to reduce egress charges – presented significant value to its network ops team.

The changeability of the fabric translates into resilience for applications – any failure of the underlying infrastructure automatically routes traffic to a backup endpoint within another availability zone, region, or cloud.  The biotech firm saw substantial value in deploying an intelligent cloud network that automatically recommended tuning while healing itself after a failure event. No other solution would be able to transform how operations managed their multicloud network fundamentally.

The bigger
picture

Uptime and productivity are critical for innovation, and risk to business operations needs to be minimized wherever possible.  Multicloud computing promises to speed innovation and create competitive advantages, but slow delivery and poor performance threaten productivity which presents a risk to the organization.  Conventional networking was limiting the ability of the company to manage risk within its cloud infrastructure.  Prosimo helped them tame multicloud risk through the newfound visibility and speed of a full-stack cloud transit solution. 

By adopting Prosimo, the healthcare services company eliminated complexity for its architecture, build, and operations teams smoothing delivery of cloud infrastructure.  Prosimo quickly identifies problems affecting an entire region or individual users while continually evaluating the multicloud fabric for performance improvements and cost savings.  Prosimo does all of this while eliminating technical debt acquired as a single cloud becomes multicloud – Prosimo orchestrates the cloud-native data path while deploying consistent network and network security policy across all clouds.