Cloud Hosting

Hybrid clouds are becoming ever more ubiquitous today. Over 90 percent of companies in Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) will rely on a mix of on-premise, public clouds and private clouds by 2021 to meet their infrastructure needs, according to a recent study by IDC.

At the same time, the opportunity for cybercrime has increased in tandem with the increased use of data that of infrastructure needs; it has also been compounded by disruptions to the technology industry - the COVID-19 pandemic being a case in point. The 2019 Singapore Cyber Landscape Report emphasised the importance of a resilient critical information infrastructure as one of its objectives to prevent significant disruptions to its economy and society.

For managing cloud infrastructures, the options are to use tools from the cloud provider, develop home-grown solutions, or to take advantage of a cloud management platform. Unfortunately, as a result, IT teams are likely to face challenges such as siloed management, limited visibility of resources, or having to manage multiple separate repositories.

Visibility is key for management

The fact remains that using multiple hosting providers for application workloads does not ease administration, operations or troubleshooting. It is a real challenge to maintain coherence between all infrastructure components located in multiple datacenters, cloud providers and IAAS solutions. When everything was hosted in a single big datacenter using a single VMware cluster it was more simple to manage, despite being distant from most infrastructure and operations teams.Therefore, having visibility from a single viewpoint is key for infrastructure management, so these teams require a central trusted repository which is accurate and up-to-date, wherever the workloads are running. This can be best provided by an IPAM (IP Address Management) solution. The repository helps not only simple management activities, but also automated network tasks and for handling more advanced requirements from business teams, such as auditing or security orchestration.

Why ongoing synchronization matters

Ensuring the central repository remains accurate requires Cloud IPAM Sync i.e. information to be synchronized in near real time between the Clouds and the IPAM. This ensures that the repository of information is kept up-to-date - a feature of growing importance in our fast-developing world of technology. Synchronization is an ongoing process that browses the Azure and AWS resources to find new ones that will be created in the IPAM, old ones that will be suppressed and existing ones that will eventually be updated. During the synchronization process, network automation linked to creation or destruction of a subnet object or an IP address will be automatically triggered. This enables pushing of the information to other systems such as billing, accounting, security or auditing. It also avoids tier systems performing their own discovery of resources inside multiple cloud environments and makes them use the IPAM as the central repository of information, the single source of network truth. Getting access to cloud inventory requires credentials, so centralizing the usage of these credentials does not compromise security in any way.

A cost control system requiring accurate knowledge of the amount of resources in a cloud is an example. Cloud solutions are proposing pay-as-you-go billing features and therefore are difficult to control. Generally 40% of IaaS servers in IaaS environments are not used for production and mostly utilized during working hours. As a result, default pay-as-you-go solutions for controlling resources are inefficient. Since the IPAM provides comprehensive visibility of all the resources currently running in various tenants, a comprehensive business analytics dashboard can track the evolution of running resources. This can then be correlated to the overall billing system resulting in significant cost savings over time.

Extend discovery to multi-cloud, include apps and devices

A robust solution is especially beneficial for the agility, reliability and security of cloud infrastructure for internal cloud resource inventory and network automation. If the Cloud IPAM Sync enhances the discovery process beyond internal datacenter boundaries, the IPAM can be considered as the central and unique source of truth for any IP-related information, particularly if applications and devices are included.

It is not an over-statement to say that advanced Cloud IPAM Sync functionality will benefit businesses in overcoming their hybrid cloud challenges. The single viewpoint visibility, unified management and control afforded through a central repository is key to helping businesses tide the wave of uncertainty and manage future challenges.

Read more here:
Keeping Control Over Cloud With IPAM Sync Featured - The Fast Mode