F500 consumer company simplifies multi-cloud networking through an automated cloud transit layer from Prosimo
CASE
STUDY
“Prosimo allowed us to take a giant leap forward in our cloud transformation journey by integrating with our infrastructure as a code development model. All we have to do is set a target, and Prosimo connects everything for us in the background. We don’t have to worry about different CSPs, their various tools, or whether our enterprise policies and services are being applied consistently and appropriately. Prosimo gives us a single point of control for connecting everything together and ensuring powerful application experiences that meet our needs.”
– Director of Infrastructure and Cloud Architecture
Key Challenges
Complex, manually-intensive cloud connectivity created tech debt that bogged down cloud operations teams and ballooned management costs.
Cloud spending was exploding to keep up with the company’s growing computing needs as it continued its cloud transformation journey.
Relying on individual CSPs’ networking tools severely limited observability into application experiences—making it difficult to meet user needs.
A lack of control across CSP environments made it impossible to apply consistent security policies to workloads—especially geographic-specific requirements.
Business agility requires cloud transformation
With more than 50 brands sold in over 35 countries, a Fortune 500 consumer goods company thrives on agility. Complex supply chains spread across borders and oceans need to be streamlined. Branding, sales and marketing operations across languages and cultures need to be centralized and consistent. And suppliers, contractors and other partners need to be managed carefully to work toward a single goal.
Cloud transformation makes this all possible—giving users across the company and partners fast, reliable and secure access to the applications and information they need to make quick, data-driven decisions. It doesn’t matter where users are located, where markets open up or where opportunities arise, the company needs to make sure it can seamlessly scale operations quickly, anywhere in the world and in the most efficient manner possible.
Home-grown cloud networking solution outgrows itself
Ensuring consistent application experiences across multiple cloud regions and cloud service providers (CSPs) falls to the company’s cloud architecture team. As users log on to the network and access applications from different locations around the world, a team of cloud operators would manually stitch together experiences based on service level agreements (SLAs) that guarantee performance, accessibility and security. Connections between cloud environments were done through open source TCPP proxies—providing a reliable application transit layer in the cloud.
While the home-grown solution worked (users, apps and data were connected in the cloud), the cloud operations team lacked visibility into application experiences—preventing it from monitoring performance, troubleshooting issues or applying consistent security controls across workloads. It had to rely on a hodgepodge of cloud networking tools from multiple CSPs, creating an increasing amount of tech debt that kept snowballing as the multi-cloud network continued to expand. Application performance started to take a hit while cloud spend skyrocketed to meet demand.
It was clear that the company needed to take the next step in its cloud journey and simplify multi-cloud networking.
Prosimo delivers infrastructure as code
The Director of Infrastructure and Cloud Architecture made the decision to simplify multi-cloud networking with Prosimo Application eXperience Infrastructure (AXI). Within an hour of signing up for the service through the Azure Marketplace, the company was able to automate application transit services across dozens of Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) regions across the world. Prosimo automatically provides the best path to application endpoints while optimizing performance and security. No longer dependent on manually stitching together experiences through its own TCP proxies, the cloud operations team lets Prosimo do the heavy lifting automatically and in real time with the peace of mind that users, applications, and data are seamlessly connected as needed.
Simplifying multi-cloud networking allows the Fortune 500 consumer company to enable infrastructure as a code model across global operations—completely orchestrating cloud networking services required to connect, scale, and secure applications with complete visibility.
“On-boarding an application in the cloud is extremely hands-off,” the Director of Infrastructure and Cloud Architecture said. “All we have to do is set a target, and we’re off and running. Prosimo connects everything for us in the background. We don’t have to worry about different CSPs, their various tools, or whether our enterprise policies and services are being applied consistently and appropriately. Prosimo gives us a single point of control for connecting everything together and ensuring powerful application experiences that meet our needs.”
Impact and outcomes
Simplifying multi-cloud networking with Prosimo AXI gives the cloud operations team end-to-end observability across cloud regions and environments. This makes it easy to identify potential bottlenecks, troubleshoot the issues and ensure application experience needs are being met—wherever and however users connect to the network. Application experience is monitored, tracked and, most importantly, controlled from a single management console—allowing cloud operators to easily ensure SLAs are being met.
In addition, the company’s expanding cloud footprint is more secure. Enterprise security policies are automatically applied to workloads regardless of the underlying infrastructure. Geographic-based controls—such as policies that govern data regulated by the EU’s GDPR regulations—are managed centrally and applied regionally as needed.
Prosimo also enables seamless scalability across CSPs—giving the Fortune 500 consumer goods company the business agility it needs to take advantage of growth opportunities as they arise and compete in an increasingly competitive market. No longer bound by the capabilities of individual CSPs, Prosimo auto scales the company’s cloud footprint per user load, saving an enormous amount of cloud spend that was previously wasted due to overprovisioning to meet peak demand.
Nearly as important, the cloud operations team is now freed up to work on more strategic, revenue-impacting projects. They can investigate anomalies, streamline operations and work on solutions to further enhance performance and agility.
The bigger
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