ISE Magazine, August 2018

AU G U S T 2 0 1 8 WWW ISEMAG COM 1 2 5 HUMAN NETWORK But instead of smooth operations youre much more likely to encounter considerable friction between these two worlds within an enterprises technical ranks Fortunately this is a situation where understanding the needs and frustrations of the people in the two worlds has already resulted in a technological fix Meet the Inhabitants of the Two Worlds Traditional data center networking teams consist of highly skilled highly certified specialists with years of hard won expertise in complicated networking hardware topologies protocols and processes With titles such as network architect or network engineer they speak fluent CLI i e command line interface and pepper their conversations with discussions of route summarizations and border gateway protocol BGP They strive for the highest levels of security reliability and performance in all their networking connections but their work is siloed into its own world They know the right way to do networking and theyre accustomed to taking great care and time to achieve that right way In contrast public Cloud teams tend to be comprised of mostly younger folks who have come of age in softwaredominant environments where infrastructure is on demand and represented in code These Cloud teams might include people with titles such as Cloud Architect Cloud Engineer or DevOps Engineer They focus on optimizing operations at the application or services level conversing about virtual private Clouds VPCs REST APIs Chef Puppet and Terraform They need to establish connectivity between and among Cloud resources at Cloud speeds as in right now and theyre tired of explaining how the Cloud works to IT networking engineers who dont understand public Cloud networking constructs Cloud teams are generalists who view traditional approaches to networking as outdated technology thats siloed in the data center and doesnt apply to the public Cloud and they see no point in mastering its arcane complexity The friction occurs whenever the inhabitants of these two worlds interact which happens with increasing frequency as todays enterprises become more and more dependent on public Cloud operations Interactions are more like talking past each other Heres how a typical conversation might go Public Cloud person I just set up a VPC for the microsite of the new ecommerce business we acquired and I need that VPC to connect to our backend systems in the Dallas data center IT Networking person OK you know the drill submit a ticket and well put it in the queue Public Cloud person But that could take weeks We need the site connected and functional by the microsite launch next week IT Networking person Making and reconfiguring those connections takes time especially to make sure theyre secure and perform up to our corporate standards You should have started this process a couple of months ago Public Cloud person But as you know the acquisition came together faster than expected and next weeks MegaConferenceShow is the ideal opportunity to make a big splash with the launch IT Networking person I understand but Im on the hook if the data center has an incident not you This is the third ticket this month Cant you make up your mind Todays public Cloud dependent enterprises cant operate optimally until networking teams can stop explaining why it takes weeks to set up or change networking connections so theyre secure stable and rock solid and Cloud teams can stop being prevented from moving at Cloud speeds every time they need to establish or alter connections between Cloud resources Now Meet the Solution to the Friction The big enterprise question becomes given that multicloud is the future how do you bring everyone along smoothly Fortunately theres a technology solution that addresses this essentially people problem More specifically the solution is a fundamentally new approach to networking in the public Cloud This new