Built on the cloud and fuelled by data, today’s digital economy is marked by never seen before convergence of enterprises, technologies and industries.
"An estimated 85% of organisation will embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025." - Gartner
After successfully migrating workloads and applications, businesses are now turning to cloud to rapidly establish and operationalise their new digital ecosystems. These ecosystems that often transcend organisational, geographical or sectoral boundaries, use cloud to build common platform for exchange of data, to collaborate, co-innovate and co-create.
As a result, more and more businesses have been jumping headfirst into multicloud architectures due to the promise of increased flexibility, scalability, and elasticity. However, those benefits come at the price of dramatically increased network complexity, which in turn presents some significant security challenges.
While we know that all global cloud service providers now support major security standards, covering critical certifications and regulations, including PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, and NIST 800-171 – which provide a certain level of assurance for businesses – the question remains: is that enough, especially when we consider how the majority of these businesses connect to their cloud(s)?
The Internet, as we know it, was not designed to handle the global scale and number of interconnected networks in the modern world today. In fact, according to the World Economic Forum, the Internet’s current architecture was conceived for the 1980s!
Our current internet uses Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) which has a number of limitations because of the way it was originally designed to act as a routing services between a limited number of trusted networks.
Since then, the BGP has evolved to become the routing spine for a much bigger infrastructure made of thousands of untrusted networks. This long transition leaves the network vulnerable to large security breaches all along the data path, resulting in data hijacking.
This opens up many security challenges, especially when you consider the accelerated adoption of the cloud by businesses around the world, and furthermore – multicloud strategies.
One thing’s for sure. It’s time to upgrade.
SCiON (Scalability, Control, and Isolation on Next-generation Networks), was developed at ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology as a new routing protocol which emphasised security and control over cheap speed.
Unlike BCP, SCiON makes the issue of data hijacking and DDoS attacks a thing of the past because it gives businesses control of where data travels geographically - combining the flexibility and accessibility of the public Internet with the security and dependability of a private MPLS.
By design, SCiON makes internet connectivity for any site, any size and any location quick to deploy and cost effective, as well as highly secure. It also adds another level of security to SD-WAN by providing more routing insurance, control, and predictability – crucial for any cloud-first enterprise.
SCiON is already seeing positive results: The Department of Foreign Affairs in Switzerland uses it to connect with embassies and the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea. Additionally, the Swiss Financial institutions are communicating with each other using SCiON technology through the Secure Swiss Finance Network.
As a Software-Defined Cloud Interconnect provider, we believe that secure connectivity to the cloud is business-critical, especially with the accelerated pace of digital transformation leading to more workloads hosted across multiple cloud providers.
In partnership with SCiON provider, Anapaya, our customers now have access their cloud environments with SCiON Access by InterCloud. This latest networking innovation combines the security and reliability of private networks with the flexibility of the Internet – enabling improved data exchanges and sharing within a secured, business-driven ecosystem.
InterCloud’s end-to-end global connectivity platform eliminates the complexity in deploying the cloud, giving businesses full control over the security, sovereignty and performance of their critical data traffic with complete peace of mind.
Working with organisations to help them transform global connectivity, reduce network complexity and accelerate growth and innovation, InterCloud is a trusted advisor to some of the world's leading brands when it comes to leveraging the cloud for future success
With offices across Europe, the company's platform is underpinned by its team of cloud experts who guide customers to implement effective strategies to leverage the power of the cloud across their organisation – making global connectivity a driver for business performance .