Why is this important? Operational Resilience is necessary for your business survivability in an increasingly uncertain world. It’s about the ability of an organisation to adapt rapidly to changing environments. Moreover, the ability of an organisation to continue to operate in the event of major disruptions such as global pandemic, sophisticated cyber attacks, climate uncertainty, IT outages or ever-increasing regulatory scrutiny. The latter is especially true for the financial and regulated sectors. Please use below links for further industry information.
PwC: https://www.pwc.co.uk/industries/financial-services/operational-resilience-time-to-act.html
Use Case Scenario: As organisations move and consume more workloads to and from public cloud, how do you then manage the risks and can demonstrate to be in control of your data and services in the event of an unplanned service outage in public cloud/s?
Unfortunately, this is especially difficult, because the challenge is you have limited visibility and limited knowledge of the public cloud infrastructures, services and capabilities. Basically, you don’t really know what’s happening in the public cloud and service providers are reluctant or even refuse to tell you. This is the complete opposite to your on-premise datacentre world.
Nevertheless, its your responsibility to know and if you fail to have strategic and robust Operational Resilience plans for public cloud services, you could be out of action for a prolonged period of time and could incur financial penalties, not to mention the reputational damage to your organisation.
But in fairness, public cloud service providers do have some capability of Operational Resilience in that services can rebuild or “bounce back” depending on the type of event. However, we already know that at times this too fails and has caused major business disruptions. https://downdetector.com/archive/. So why rely solely on the native cloud vendors for your Operational Resilience? You shouldn’t!
Solution: Augment the cloud service providers resiliency capabilities and deploy Aviatrix Multi Cloud Network Architecture (MCNA) and Transit solution. Give your organisation self-control to redeploy cloud workloads quickly and effectively in a crisis situation and minimise disruption to your production service. Workloads can be redeployed to a different region within the same cloud provider or better still, to a completely different cloud service provider benefiting from real business value. More details on MCNA via this link: https://2ujst446wdhv3307z249ttp0-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Aviatrix-Cloud-Network-Platform-Solution-Brief.pdf
With Aviatrix MCNA and Transit solution, organisations get a robust, secure and fully automated solution that allows for seamless connectivity between cloud networks within/across regions or cloud providers. It supports a number of self-healing mechanisms and intelligent routing changes in case of a failure of one path. This set of features, combined with your organisation’s Disaster Recovery architecture, allows you to prevent or automatically recover from outages in the cloud network, cloud region or cloud provider.
With all of this easily proven to regulators, auditors and compliance teams, MCNA will help to maximise Operational Resilience plans, minimise risk of outages and improve your organisation’s ability to adapt quickly and continue to operate in the event of a major disruption. Organisations no longer need to be solely dependent and at the mercy of the cloud provider to manage your Operational Resilience for your critical cloud workloads.
How does MCNA & Transit solution work: Aviatrix MCNA and Transit solution is an overlay architecture, meaning that it sits on top of public cloud native constructs as an abstraction layer. It understands and is able to manage and augment the native constructs with additional sophisticated controls and enhanced routing and security capabilities. These intelligent enhancements are not available within the native cloud constructs, leaving critical gaps for customer to solve themselves.
MCNA solution enables organisations with a unique ability and fingertip controls to move cloud workloads quickly, automatically and securely.
At a high level, MCNA is made up of three critical but highly intelligent software components:
• Aviatrix Controller – Provides intelligent programmatic control over the cloud native constructs so you can easily take advantage of the cloud providers existing native services. The Aviatrix controller is the brain of the cloud network platform.
The platform leverages the centralised intelligence and knowledge of the controller to dynamically program both native cloud network constructs and Aviatrix’s own advanced services. Our single Terraform provider enables network and security Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) automation across your multi-cloud environment.
• Aviatrix Transit and Spoke Gateway - Transit architecture builds secure communication channels and intelligently routes the traffic between VPCs/VNETs/VCNs within a cloud and/or between different clouds and on-premise.
• Aviatrix Gateways - Delivers advanced cloud networking and security services. Gateways are primarily deployed to deliver transit network and security services such as intelligent dynamic routing, active-active network high-availability, end-to-end and high-performance encryption and collect operational visibility data, but also for secure network ingress and egress filtering and external service insertion.
• Aviatrix CoPilot - A single pane of glass for advanced day 2 operational management of your global multi-cloud network and leverages the intelligence and advanced network and security capabilities delivered by Aviatrix’s multi-cloud network platform.
More details about the Controller, Gateways and CoPilot can be found here: https://aviatrix.com/cloud-network-platform/#multi-cloud-architecture/
Whilst there are many other business benefits, my focus has been centred on the key use case benefits when using Aviatrix as an integral part of your organisation’s Operational Resilience and Business Continuity Plan.
With Aviatrix you are now enabled with a unique solution and ability to remove the reliance and dependency on the cloud provider in the event of a major cloud disruption. Aviatrix has giving you back the full control and visibility to simply and confidently move workloads out of the cloud disaster zone and into a safe place whilst managing and mitigating operational risk and the cost of service disruption.
Want to find out more? Please visit www.aviatrix.com
One Architecture. One Network. Any Cloud.
About the author: jgonsalves@aviatrix.com
I joined Aviatrix as a Principal Field Evangelist in January 2021 to partner and build relationships with top customers as well as peers at AWS, Azure and GCP helping to pave the way for the future of networking and security in public clouds. Prior to joining Aviatrix, I spent the past 20 years at Citigroup as the Global Head of Network Engineering. Most of my career has been in strategic leadership roles working for large financial enterprises helping drive innovation and adoption of next generation technologies.
