Building the cloud on a solid foundation

In the data centre consolidation and virtualisation are driving a fundamentally different approach to the provisioning and delivery of IT applications and services. The ability to create shared resource pools and dynamically allocate them is at the heart of cloud computing and offers significant cost and performance benefits. However, cloud computing creates major performance and security challenges for network designers.

Long latency

Traditional networks were never designed to handle dynamic data centre resources. If applications and their associated storage are not located close to each other, users can experience unacceptably long latency times. Consequently, you still have to plan virtual machines and storage very carefully to optimise performance. As a result, virtualisation is not the liberating experience it should be.

In addition, as traditional networks grow they become more complex, more costly and exponentially more difficult to configure, provision, operate and manage.

New security threats

At the same time consolidation and virtualisation pose new security threats. Traffic between virtual machines doesn’t touch the physical network. Virtual machines migrate across physical servers, leading to unpredictable combinations of trusted and untrusted machines. Distributed applications require robust authentication across all application elements and secure encryption between them.

Solid foundation

At Scalable we’ve made it our business to fully understand the challenges facing your data centres and the demands cloud computing will make on your networks. Working with our chosen partners we put together solutions that don’t just overcome today’s performance and security challenges, they also put in place a solid foundation for successfully taking today’s data centres into the cloud.

Learn more about our data centre solutions. Contact us now or call 0844 742 2010.