Running a Network-Centric Cloud Architecture: 10 Benefits

by Chris Preimesberger

Having a more intuitive network-centric approach provides better alignment of enterprises’ on-premises architecture with their cloud environment.

A higher performing cloud platform can support resource-hungry applications more cost-effectively and has led providers to offer service-level agreements that are truly enterprise-class, making it even more attractive to businesses whose chief concern has been reliability.

At the network layer, automation enables users to self-provision certain elements before they are assigned to servers, instead of the other way around.

Removing the need to “BYOS” (bring your own security) or rearchitect applications can reduce the time it takes to actually deploy and manage the environment. By segmenting cloud servers using virtual local area networks (VLANs) and firewalls, existing security can be extended to the cloud environment and managed on an ongoing basis through a user interface or API.

With faster processing, file access and networking, businesses can run mission-critical applications in the cloud more cost-effectively and reliably.

Workloads such as data analytics, big data, computer modeling and simulation are run more efficiently due to the faster disk access, memory throughput and virtual machine to virtual machine network throughput.

Higher performance capabilities combined with built-in load balancing, firewalls and network segmentation make it easy to scale multitier applications. Multitier applications separate the Web, application and data servers into different tiers for improved scale and isolation.

Enterprise resource planning applications (such as SAP and SAS) and unified communications (such as Cisco and Siemens) that typically require higher CPU and memory will run well on a network-centric cloud.

With better performance, organizations would need to use fewer cloud servers. Web-based businesses, online gaming and online advertising networks that typically require fast access to files can run more cost-effectively.

In addition to high performance, the network-centric cloud can provide companies with the ability to control and secure the cloud with built-in firewalls, VLANs and end-user permission controls. By addressing security, reliability and performance, the risk associated with migrating applications to the cloud is lowered.