Creating an application network highway to the cloud

Expanding cloud footprint results in increased complexity

That all assumes, however, that companies have the network or connectivity capabilities to move applications, data and workloads as required. This isn’t always the case, as a Consulting Delivery Manager at Orange Business noted during a recent customer workshop: “When you start moving your applications to the cloud, you soon realize you’re adding another layer of complexity in terms of network, routing and also security, on top of your traditional networks.” My discussions with customers highlighted three main challenges businesses face when deploying multiple clouds.

The three challenges of having multiple clouds

First is the challenge of mastering both connectivity and cloud, since network and cloud teams are rarely integrated or even aligned, as one customer said, “It is hard to master cloud and networking at the same time.”

This also means a lack of visibility: “For many customers lacking expertise in multiple cloud service providers, the cloud can seem like a black box,” adds our cloud networking expert. “There is a lack of visibility on cost when applications run on multiple hyperscalers.”

Second, there is a need to control operations. A lack of network orchestration functionality can delay application migrations. As another customer commented, this leads to “delaying our projects and making us incur additional hosting charges.” For instance, interconnecting multiple SD-WAN overlay networks spread across different regions and involving more than one cloud service provider can often take much longer than expected.

Third, the challenge of ensuring reliability. Problems around networks and application performance can be exacerbated when you have to spend time troubleshooting across multiple cloud environments. This resulting downtime directly impacts business effectiveness.

Underpinning all these are constant security concerns. Having multiple cloud and network providers means combining multiple cyberdefense approaches with an enterprise’s own. This can often lead to a lack of oversight, making it difficult to ensure everything is secured and increasing the likelihood of a data breach or other security incident.

Orange Business and Prosimo: solving the cloud and networking puzzle

Orange Business and U.S. cloud network specialist Prosimo launched an innovative partnership in March 2024. We have prioritized partnering with a leading multi-cloud networking partner that demonstrates agility and a complementary value proposition for our network and cloud expertise portfolio. Prosimo is a cloud-native company that offers a full-stack cloud network platform for multi-cloud connectivity, security and compliance.

Orange Business has over 12 years of experience in interconnecting networks and clouds, and today we’re positioned as a preferred service provider of cloud networking services for customers, helping them overcome complexity challenges. Cloud networking offers enterprises a framework of services that provides end-to-end design, deployment and unified operations for running a network in multiple cloud environments.

Creating the network highway for moving applications across cloud together

By combining Prosimo technology with the performance of our private backbone, we can offer a full, end-to-end, scalable and secured path to the cloud and between clouds. This is enabled by Evolution Platform, a digital-by-design SDN platform that combines the composability of cloud networking with Orange Business connectivity services.

Bringing together our connectivity with Prosimo’s multi-cloud networking technology means customers can orchestrate and propagate routing and security rules between their Orange networks and multi-cloud properties to deliver diverse connectivity for applications and services running in their cloud environments. They can use the Orange Business backbone as the most cost-effective and available path to transport traffic between multiple cloud regions versus the backbones of hyperscalers. Prosimo allows them to monitor and troubleshoot the performance of applications.

Orange Business and Prosimo offer customers the capacity to build their own network highways so that applications are delivered securely with the best performance levels at optimized costs. To find out more, email digitalinfrastructure.europe@orange.com, or read our cloud networking eBook here.