Way back in 2015, an IMD survey of business executives asked how big an impact “digital disruption” would have on their industries. Only 27% of respondents thought it would be significant. Only four years later in 2019, executives had changed their tune (or the old ones weren’t around anymore), because 88% of respondents in that year’s survey thought that digital disruption would be major or transformative. I don’t think we need to reflect very hard about what’s happened in the last couple of years to understand that digital is now the center of business execution, operation, growth, and competitiveness.
But so-called digital transformation doesn’t just happen magically by itself. It requires an IT transformation, and that is why enterprises have gone all in on hybrid and multi-cloud architectures–what we call the cloud core. Cloud transformation started and has been most aggressive in the U.S. However, the UK, Europe and Middle East (EMEA) are also rapidly adopting cloud, followed by Asia-Pacific.
Connecting this enterprise cloud core with carrier-class quality, five nines resiliency, and cloud scale is what PacketFabric excels at. So, I’m very excited to share that PacketFabric is expanding availability of our award-winning Cloud Router to the UK and Europe, which also means you can build cloud routing connectivity between North America and EMEA, with throughput up to 100Gbps.
Quick Cloud Router Primer
Cloud Router, is a Layer 3 virtualized routing service that is hosted on and delivered by the PacketFabric Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) platform. You don’t need any physical networking equipment, cross-connects, etc to use Cloud Router for use cases like multi-cloud connectivity. As such it is perfect for cloud-native networking. You can create a Cloud Router via our portal or API, then add hosted or dedicated private cloud connections.
If you’re staying in inter-region connectivity within a single or across multiple cloud providers, you’re going to experience Cloud Router as if it’s a VPN tunnel overlay. Except the magic is that it isn’t! You can get up to 100Gbps private optical connections via hosted direct connections, and 100Gbps via dedicated cloud connections over our 50T+ network. It’s like you set up a bunch of your own routers, and had your own dark fiber, except you can just get connections by the month. If you have a presence in one of the hundreds of colocation data centers where we have PoPs, you can also spin up VCs to those from Cloud Router, in which case obviously you’ll need a port on our network and cross-connects to your infrastructure in that DC. Cloud Router also offers site-to-site IPsec VPN connectivity for any other site you want to connect, such as branch offices.
I mentioned previously that Cloud Router is an award-winning solution. In just the past few months, Cloud Router has won the Pipeline Cloud Innovation award, Layer123 Network Transformation Award for New Service Innovation, and the Stratus Award for Cloud Computing amongst others. This level of recognition is remarkable for a product that was introduced to the world only 9 months ago.
Inter-Region and Multi-Cloud Use Cases
If you’re a network provider, you can now take advantage of our ENNI support to offer network extensions from The Uptime Institute’s 2019 Annual Data Center Survey reported that respondents believed that by 2021 (now), 50% of workloads would be running outside of the data center, in the cloud. With Cloud Router, you can forgo unpredictable, low-scale VPN tunnels and connect your cloud regions together via SLA-backed private connectivity. Now, with cloud on-ramps across EMEA and North America, you can build a backbone across those geographies in minutes.
Multi-cloud is also rising fast. In fact, this year’s Hashicorp State of Cloud Strategy survey is entitled “The Multi-Cloud Era,” and one of their key stats gathered from 3200 respondents is that 76% reported that they are already multi-cloud. One survey respondent articulated the trend thusly: “Multi-cloud is the way to go. It’s that simple.” If that describes your cloud architecture, then Cloud Router is even more powerful for your purposes. You can connect cloud regions from AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM, and Oracle, within North America or Europe, or across the Atlantic in minutes.
Make Your Network a Strategic Enabler
According to Gartner, by 2023 over 60% of enterprises will consider networking as core to their digital strategies, up from 20% in 2019, deeming networking as a strategic enabler. It’s about time. The network can either be a massive friction point for your cloud core architecture or can be a massive enabler. Unreliable Internet or slow, inflexible traditional telecom approaches aren’t fit to purpose anymore. Cloud Router is available by the month to give your cloud core connectivity the agility it needs to shift, flex, and meet your business needs.
Learn more about Cloud Router, check out more details in our excellent knowledge base, or get started today. Or if you’d like to discuss how to evolve your cloud core with NaaS, request a demo.