In this blog, I delve into the core categories that encapsulate organizations’ challenges in building a robust multi-cloud network and describe how the joint Prosimo and Fabric Cloud Router solution can resolve each challenge.
Challenges with Multi-Cloud Networking
In our extensive conversations with customers who have been steadily expanding their presence in the cloud, a recurring theme has emerged – the challenges they face in constructing a robust multi-cloud network. These challenges, diverse in nature, can be categorized into several key areas.
Fig 1 – Multicloud Network Architecture Challenges
Connectivity within and across regions
Ensuring seamless connectivity within and across regions and clouds is challenging. Customers grapple with peering orchestration using native CSP services like Transit Gateway and Virtual WAN. Managing networking orchestration through route tables, DNS, Load balancers, and security groups adds complexity, along with challenges like overlapping IP addresses and multi-account management.
Security
Security is a paramount concern when building a multi-cloud network. One of the challenges customers face is in threat detection and traffic inspection. Implementing effective security for East-West traffic involves deploying firewalls strategically to monitor and filter traffic, identifying and mitigating potential threats. Additionally, implementing traffic segmentation is crucial as organizations need to control and monitor traffic flow, limiting the potential impact of security breaches.
Privacy and Compliance
Privacy and compliance in a multi-cloud setup require addressing data protection and regulatory concerns. Utilizing traffic encryption enhances data confidentiality during transit within and across clouds. Compliance is achieved through traffic segregation methods like routing domains, network grouping, and tagging, ensuring alignment with standards. Additionally, effective control of traffic to internet endpoints is critical for maintaining privacy and compliance standards.
Cost Control
Effective cost control is essential for managing a multi-cloud network efficiently. Decision-making around cost-optimized path selection involves choosing economical routes for data transfer without sacrificing performance. Achieving visibility into costs is crucial for informed financial management, requiring tools to provide detailed insights into cloud expenditures.
What is the Equinix Fabric Cloud Router?
The Equinix Fabric Cloud Router(FCR) is an on-demand virtual routing service on Equinix Fabric that offers efficient private Layer 3 connectivity across public clouds, colocation facilities, and Equinix services. Its versatility extends to deploying dedicated cloud on-ramp connections, ensuring high performance in cross-cloud network connectivity. Beyond connections, the FCR excels in routing, high availability, scaling, and cost optimization, providing a valuable solution for organizations managing multicloud complexities.
Fig 2: Equinix Fabric Cloud Router
Prosimo And Equinix FCR Joint Value Proposition
While the Equinix Fabric Cloud Router (FCR) offers valuable benefits to organizations, some issues still need to be addressed across critical categories such as networking, privacy and compliance, cost control, and security, as previously mentioned. This is where the Prosimo platform, a solution designed to complement the FCR as an L3-L7 overlay, is valuable as it effectively addresses those issues and unlocks use cases that were previously unmet.
Fig 3: MCN Architecture using Prosimo platform and Equinix Fabric Cloud Router(FCR)
By combining the strengths of Prosimo and Equinix FCR, organizations can achieve efficient multi-cloud connectivity. This involves orchestrating Cloud Service Provider (CSP)-native services like Transit Gateway (TGW) and Virtual WAN (VWAN hub) while managing route tables and security groups with the Prosimo overlay solution. This ensures that, while the connectivity and routing requirements between the cloud environments are met, similar requirements for intra and inter-region connectivity within the cloud provider’s environments are also met.
Additionally, the Prosimo platform resolves challenges related to overlapping IPs and multi-account management and provides Application Delivery Controller (ADC) capabilities, including load balancers, DNS management, and reverse proxy.
Enhancing security posture in the cloud is another notable achievement with this combined solution. The embedded web application firewall in Prosimo and its orchestration of third-party Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFW) ensures robust protection against advanced web-based and network layer threats. Implementing segmentation for intra and inter-VPC/VNET traffic adds an additional layer of security within and across regions and clouds.
Privacy and compliance across cloud environments are also maintained through the secure overlay provided by Prosimo for data in transit. This solution leverages Equinix FCR’s highly performant links. Prosimo’s capabilities extend to segregating critical traffic using virtual routing domains and network groups within and across the cloud environments. Additionally, it enables precise control over traffic destined for internet targets. This capability also provides security benefits as it helps prevent attacks via command-and-control(CnC) operations.
Consistency in enforcing a zero-trust policy framework across cloud environments is achieved through the Prosimo platform. Its policy engine empowers organizations to build network- and application-centric policies that are consistently implemented across various cloud environments. These policies ensure only authorized traffic flows between network or application endpoints based on a range of parameters such as 5-tuple, HTTP methods, time of day, and more.
Maintaining financial discipline is a crucial consideration, and this combined solution provides deep visibility into cloud cost accruals and facilitates chargebacks to different lines of business within the organization. Leveraging the cost-optimized paths offered via the FCR to connect other regions and cloud environments further contributes to effective cost-control measures.
The collaboration between Prosimo and Equinix FCR emerges as a comprehensive solution, unlocking use cases and addressing the diverse challenges organizations face in managing a robust multi-cloud network.
Joint Use Cases for Prosimo and Equinix FCR
Unlock a spectrum of transformative use cases with the powerful collaboration of Prosimo and Equinix Fabric Cloud Router (FCR).
One-click Multi-Cloud Networking (MCN):
Organizations can harness the joint solution to seamlessly deploy highly performant, secure multi-region and multi-cloud networks. Additionally, they gain deep visibility from Layer 3 to Layer 7, coupled with robust cost management benefits.
Fig 4: One-click MCN Architecture
B2B Cloud Network Exchange:
B2B partnerships will be rapidly onboarded using the capabilities of Prosimo and FCR. Challenges related to overlapping IP, DNS, and performance issues can be overcome effortlessly. Also, policy-based connectivity and segmentation can be utilized to streamline traffic flow to and from partners, ensuring secure, efficient, and policy-compliant communication channels.
Fig 5: Prosimo and FCR MCN Architecure to power B2B partnerships.
Cross-Cloud Service Connect:
Interactions between applications and services can be enhanced with seamless cross-cloud connectivity using Prosimo and the FCR. Organizations achieve various benefits, including enhanced privacy, security, deep visibility, and optimal performance. This collaborative solution paves the way for a versatile and efficient cross-cloud service connection that caters to the diverse needs of modern organizations.
