How to Conform Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure to Your Business Needs

Enterprises continue to modernize their IT by extending their infrastructure to colocation data centers, private clouds, and public clouds. These technology advancements have combined to form a more complex “edge” IT infrastructure. The movement to the edge has created challenges for NetOps, SecOps, and other IT professionals, who must deliver consistent service levels and a digital experience that meets or exceeds user expectations. According to IDC, the user experience is a primary determinant of success for any digital transformation. Mark Leary, research director at IDC, says delivering a high-quality digital experience across a complex and shifting hyperconnected infrastructure is central to productive workflows and profitable interactions.

The wide-area networks (WANs) that connect all these hybrid and multi-cloud locations create new technological, geographical, and administrative borders, which require end-to-end visibility to assure the performance and security of services. NETSCOUT Visibility without Borders empowers IT teams to accelerate innovation and migrate workloads in hybrid cloud environments with confidence. How does NETSCOUT achieve anywhere, any-application, any-infrastructure, anytime visibility? By converting packet data into consistent, actionable information regardless of collection point, making it relevant to the application and services being delivered. NETSCOUT’s scalable, distributed architecture stores and processes all of this data at the collection point and then forwards the most relevant indicators, in real-time, to a single monitoring and analysis platform, without losing the ability to go back into the stored data for additional details.

NETSCOUT recently collaborated with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Aruba to combine AWS Cloud WAN and Aruba EdgeConnect Enterprise SD-WAN into a joint solution that offers end-to-end visibility into the performance of workloads and application services deployed in the hybrid cloud across data centers, remote sites, and AWS.

How It Works

AWS Cloud WAN is a managed WAN service that allows customers to easily connect and route their data centers, remote sites, and cloud applications over the AWS global network. Cloud WAN enables customers to build and operate their WANs via simple network policies, removing the need to stitch together various networking, security, and third-party services.

The Aruba EdgeConnect Enterprise SD-WAN platform enables customers to build a unified WAN edge that is business-driven, delivers a high-quality experience, and adapts to changing business needs and network conditions. Its architectural model utilizes virtual WAN overlays based on business requirements (business intent overlays) for every class of application.

NETSCOUT IT has been using the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution across AWS Cloud WAN to connect its own Westford, Massachusetts, data center and remote branch offices to production, management, and test virtual private clouds (VPCs) in AWS. NETSCOUT IT is also deploying its vSTREAM solution in the remote locations and AWS cloud, InfiniStreamNG in the data center, and nGeniusONE to provide end-to-end visibility and service assurance across all locations.

The figure below describes the architecture in which SD-WAN locations access AWS-hosted resources based on traffic segmentation across Test, Production, and Management environments. The management VPC in AWS is hosting the nGeniusOne platform that collects metadata from the vSTREAM appliances and converts it into actionable intelligence for service assurance and security. Traffic segmentation is also extended across the WAN from the branch edge to AWS VPCs in the cloud.

Achieving Business Benefits

“NETSCOUT is using Aruba EdgeConnect to conform our hybrid cloud infrastructure to the needs of the business,” explains NETSCOUT CIO Thor Wallace. “This SD-WAN platform effectively connects our edge-to-AWS enterprise, allowing us to enforce security and service performance policies across the WAN. The NETSCOUT visibility fabric, composed of nGeniusONE, vSTREAM, and InfiniStreamNG, is enabling us to deliver the highest-quality user experience by assuring service performance and security end to end across the geographically dispersed infrastructure and the extended attack surface.”

“Aruba is collaborating with NETSCOUT to assure that our combined organizational, operational, and technical capabilities help our customers realize business benefits faster and more efficiently,” says Aruba WAN technical alliance coordinator Fraser Street. “NETSCOUT is both a customer and a partner, and we are pleased to collaborate with NETSCOUT on the AWS Cloud WAN project and the validation of the architecture described in this blog.”

Learn more about NETSCOUT AWS solutions.