Cloud Gateway Series
What to Look for in a Cloud Gateway
Digg
Reddit
Delicious
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
BuzzPart 2 of a 2-Part Series
By Ellen Rubin
The last post explored why more and more enterprises and technology vendors are making the adoption of a cloud gateway a top priority. This post focuses on the capabilities that all stakeholders should look for.
So what exactly is a cloud gateway? A cloud gateway is technology that extends the enterprise data center or private cloud out to external clouds. It’s a core component of the hybrid model, and when it’s well-architected, it brings simplicity, flexibility, and control to cloud computing. By shielding users and IT departments from the complexity of cloud deployments, the gateway makes applications portable across different cloud architectures, platforms and even different hypervisors. It provides cloud users with easy access to the widest range of resources and services available, and gives technology vendors a platform for delivering high-value services to on-premise and cloud environments. It’s also a platform for innovation around new capabilities that now become available in the hybrid cloud model.
Here’s what a well-designed cloud gateway needs to do:
- Guarantee security: Data needs to be encrypted end to end, from inside the corporate firewall, across the Internet, and within the cloud infrastructure. Encryption keys need to be under enterprise control at all times, and off-limits to everyone else. The cloud becomes an integral part of the enterprise IT environment with data at rest and network communications protected from both the cloud provider and 3rd parties at all times.
- Extend enterprise networking: Every enterprise has a unique network infrastructure for connecting its servers and applications — things like addressing schemes, topology, identity and directory services, and network equipment (firewalls, routers, and switches). Cloud providers have completely different network architectures to support their multi-tenant operations. The gateway needs to enable enterprises to match their current network topologies when they are using the cloud, and have the ability to bridge specific network segments (or LANs) to the cloud in a simple and automated fashion – including both layer-2 (Ethernet) and layer-3 (Internet Protocol) connectivity.
- Deliver enterprise-class network appliances: As more and more network vendors introduce their own cloud versions, customers want to be able to leverage what they already have on-premise and use trusted vendor products for their cloud deployments. These enterprises have made significant investments in the management and operation of these appliances. A cloud gateway should enable the use of these trusted vendors across the various cloud offerings available to allow the enterprise to leverage policies, configurations, and expertise when extending into the cloud.
- Integrate with data center infrastructure: A gateway should be able to tie into existing virtualization infrastructure to allow users to seamlessly combine the cloud deployments with on-premise applications and infrastructure. The gateway should be able to interact with different virtualization technologies (VMware, Xen Server, Hyper-V, KVM) to give enterprises the broadest scope and flexibility in cloud deployments as they evolve their virtualization and cloud strategies.
- Provide seamless visibility and control: The gateway should allow users and administrators to monitor and manage applications running in a cloud as if they were running locally, using existing tools and polices in a single, integrated environment. Cloud resources should appear as part of the corporate infrastructure, with external pools of capacity appearing alongside internal ones.
- Protect roles and access: Dedicated individuals or teams are usually responsible for setting up enterprise networking, storage, virtual machines, applications, monitoring, etc. In the wild west of the cloud, with the paradigm shift towards self-service provisioning and management, these responsibilities fall on the end user — typically the developer or business user as they access cloud resources. These users are often unaware of corporate policies or configurations, and are unsure how to address these requirements. The cloud gateway should preserve the multi-role capabilities required for enterprise control, allowing rules to be created and enforced while letting users access cloud resources on demand.
- Span disparate cloud architectures: All the requirements mentioned above need to span multiple clouds, with their different APIs, hypervisors, storage architectures, etc. The gateway needs to give users access to the widest range of choices so they can take advantage of all the cloud has to offer. The gateway must be designed with a deep understanding of different cloud providers’ capabilities and differences, so it can deliver optimal services and the best price/performance to meet customers’ specific requirements.
A Platform for Innovation
Beyond meeting the needs of customers and vendors today, the gateway is a platform for innovation that opens the door to a new generation of capabilities. The cloud gateway sits at the nexus of new technologies – it ties into the virtualization infrastructure within the data center, tightly integrates into the network infrastructure, and connects with multiple external clouds. The ability to interact with all these key components enables new services and solutions. Here are a few examples:
- Cloud brokerage: Workloads can be moved to the right environment based on business and technical requirements. Users can examine a menu of available clouds and choose the ones that provide the best combination of pricing, QoS, provider flexibility, or other criteria.
- Geographically distributed applications: The cloud provides the freedom to place workloads around the world. The gateway allows simplified network management, multi-cloud support (the ability to choose clouds nearest your consumers), and central control for resource management.
- Data management: The gateway is in a key position for managing data and workload distribution. With ties into both the data center and target clouds, the gateway can facilitate data movement, replication, remote access, and security of data.
- Enhanced security: With access to enterprise resources as well as control of distributed networking and compute resources, the gateway is an ideal place for delivering new security models – including remote access, distributed policies, and advanced virus protection.
The concept of a cloud gateway is capturing mindshare across the cloud industry –from enterprise customers to technology vendors and service providers. It’s a key enabler for their cloud strategies, and they’re eagerly looking for ways to take advantage of it, to meet current requirements and introduce some new paradigms in enterprise computing.
Now Everybody Wants a Cloud Gateway
Part 1 of a 2-Part Series
By Ellen Rubin
In our discussions with industry insiders, we’re hearing more and more about the need for a cloud gateway — technology that provides a bridge between an organization’s internal environment and one or more public clouds. It’s a message we’re also hearing with growing frequency from enterprise customers and potential partners alike as their cloud architectures mature. In the first post of this series, I’d like to look at what’s behind this trend, and why different stakeholders are making the cloud gateway a top priority.
First of all, it’s another clear signal that cloud computing is becoming mainstream. We’re well past the stage where every cloud deployment is a one-off reengineering project to enable an enterprise application to run in a public cloud. Organizations are no longer willing to tolerate the delays and costs in order to reap the benefits, and now they don’t have to. The gateway simplifies the integration and management of cloud resources so people can get on with using the cloud rather than struggling to make it work.
It’s also connected to the emergence of hybrid clouds that allow enterprises to use cloud resources while leveraging their internal infrastructure. There’s broad consensus that the hybrid model, with pools of internal and external resources federated together, is the best way for large and mid-size enterprises to do cloud computing. Now they’re urgently looking for efficient ways to bring the hybrid cloud to life. They want to be able to turn resources on and off for spiky apps or short-term projects, and a multitude of use cases where workloads flow where they best fit when a threshold is reached. By enabling on-demand access to public clouds with tight integration to data center services, the cloud gateway does the heavy lifting so enterprises can work across these different environments.
We’re also seeing growing momentum from technology vendors, who recognize that the cloud provides an opportunity to move beyond the internal data center, which has become highly commoditized. Much of the demand is coming from network technology companies that provide things like load balancing, firewalling, WAN optimization, and storage optimization — all those capabilities that are normally part of a company’s internal infrastructure. Dozens of established and emerging vendors in this space are looking for ways to move beyond this traditional market, and see the cloud as unclaimed territory. A cloud gateway opens up an exciting new market for these vendors while allowing them to leverage internal technologies (preferably theirs) that customers already have.
A cloud gateway has also become a top priority for providers of virtualization solutions, for many of the reasons mentioned above. The hypervisor has become a commodity as the market has matured and more vendors have introduced competing hypervisor offerings, sometimes for free. Most virtualization players now realize they can’t win with their hypervisor alone. The focus has shifted, and they’ve been trying to move up the virtualization stack by promoting their higher-level management capabilities — competing on things like self-service, charge-back, fault tolerance, resource scheduling, load balancing, etc.
For virtualization vendors, the cloud represents an opportunity, but also a direct threat to their on-premise footprints. They’re urgently exploring how to extend their management functionality into the cloud so they can preserve and capture market share. The ability to span the data center and multiple public clouds, orchestrating between internal and external worlds, is where the new virtualization battles are being fought, and where the cloud gateway is one of the leading weapons.
The cloud gateway has become essential as companies incorporate cloud computing into their business and IT strategies. It’s a message we hear over and over in our discussions with corporate CIOs as well as with executives from technology firms. The next post will examine what characteristics different stakeholders should look for in a cloud gateway in order to be successful.
Coming Up Next: What to Look For in a Cloud Gateway
