The convergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), edge, and cloud has changed how enterprises balance core applications and processing capabilities between public clouds and the edge. Remote branch offices, manufacturing sites, and retail stores are no longer just connecting through a centralized WAN – a good majority of these connections are happening in the cloud. Making the most of this convergence could result in operational efficiencies, new experiences for customers, and new business opportunities. But the challenge comes in the form of added complexity with management and security across multiple data centers, clouds, and end points.
It might be manageable if we were talking about a homogenous environment, but the reality is that this is happening in a heterogeneous environment. Millions of IoT devices, applications, and endpoints are connecting to the network. To address this, resources are being migrated to different public clouds like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and IBM to house and analyze data from everywhere. However, a big concern for customers is how they securely manage this growing cloud ecosystem. They could be using three or four cloud vendors to get the features and capabilities to meet their specific needs. Customers are asking for a unified approach to how they manage connectivity across the enterprise, provision infrastructure resources, and deploy applications – between the data center, private cloud, public cloud and edge environments.
The next wave of connectivity will bring tens of billions of devices online. All these devices, connections, and different clouds can create gaps in protecting the network and assets. Customers want to be able to enforce a strict, uniform security policy everywhere but highly-distributed infrastructures and connections are creating more security threats and Vulnerabilities. Consistent, integrated security across their enterprise spanning from the data center, cloud, and to the edge is more critical than ever before.
Are you trying to manage across multiple data centers, clouds, and end points? What sort of complexity are you encountering in your ecosystem.
By Kip Compton, Vice President of Cloud Platform and Solutions Group at Cisco
