Key Tools for Maximizing your Hybrid Cloud Investments Sponsored by

Key Tools for Maximizing your Hybrid Cloud Investments 2

Key Tools for Maximizing your Hybrid Cloud Investments

There are good reasons to use resources from a mix of private and

public cloud services. Perhaps most important, this “hybrid cloud”

approach frees your organization to use data, application, storage,

compute, and development resources from many different sources.

Be aware, though, that success with your hybrid cloud

deployments hinges on your ability to effectively manage your

WAN’s behavior. That’s because the WAN is the network highway

supporting the back-and-forth communications between your

users and the various cloud services. So it needs to perform with

the response times and reliability that users have grown to expect

from high-speed LANs.

Making sure that happens requires sophisticated performance and

WAN optimization tools. Among other things, these tools help you

counteract the effects of latency introduced by geographical WAN

distances. They also allow you to alleviate network congestion

that might result from sending lots of large files and retransmitting

dropped packets.

Having the ability to see and control the performance and security of your WAN traffic is vital to your cloud success.

Key Tools for Maximizing your Hybrid Cloud Investments 3

Investing in business-grade WAN services, such as Multiprotocol

Label Switching (MPLS) IP-VPNs, is one way to boost

performance. MPLS IP-VPNs usually carry 99.999% (“five nines”)

service-level agreements (SLAs) for network availability. That takes

care of uptime. Keeping traffic flows moving at the speed you

need to make the hybrid cloud a success, however, requires extra

control measures, observed respondents to a 2014 IDG Research

Services poll of IT decision makers.

For example, 61% cited network performance management tools

as their favored method for optimizing WAN performance for their

cloud deployments. More than half (52%) said that they see their

corporate networks as a barrier to achieving cloud benefits, given

that its availability and performance levels can fluctuate.1

So where do you begin in breaking through WAN performance

barriers and deploying the right tools?

1 http://resources.idgenterprise.com/original/AST-0127180_XO_Quick_Poll_714.pdf

Controlling Network Performance

“ “More than half (52%) said that they see their

corporate networks as a barrier to achieving

cloud benefits, given that its availability and

performance levels can fluctuate.

Key Tools for Maximizing your Hybrid Cloud Investments 4

There are five well-understood types of network management that

help you keep your network humming smoothly and securely.

• Performance management: Measuring the network performance

metrics so you can maintain network operations at acceptable

levels. The most common metrics measured are network

availability, throughput, bandwidth utilization, and latency (or

delay). Some tools also measure packet loss and jitter.

• Configuration management: Monitoring network and system

configuration information so you can track and manage the

effects of various versions of hardware and software elements.

• Accounting management: Measuring network utilization

parameters so that individual or group users on the network can

be regulated appropriately.

• Fault management: Detecting, logging, and fixing network problems.

• Security management: Controlling who can access your network

resources according to business policy to avoid network

breaches and confidential data leakage.

First, it helps to know about the many types of tools available. There

are five basic types of tools for monitoring, measuring, controlling,

and troubleshooting various aspects of your network (see box) that

have been around for quite some time. They can be purchased for

deployment at your various sites or as a network-based service

from a cloud or other network service provider. Basic tools help you

maintain visibility into what’s happening on your WAN links. Some

generate alerts and alarms to indicate you should take real-time

action on a situation or network condition. Others generate historical

reports so you can see trends, such as generally when your peak

traffic times are, and size your network accordingly.

Newer types of tools have been developed to give you very tight

control over your WAN’s behavior and traffic patterns, a must as

you come to rely on the WAN for mission-critical capabilities and

cloud access. Among these tools are application performance

management and WAN optimization capabilities. Security

management tools are also maturing. These are also critical, given

that even the best-performing networked applications will be

deemed a failure if they are compromised.

Together, all these tools help ensure optimum yet secure

application experiences across WANs, where distance-induced

latency can otherwise degrade response times and application

usability. Having centralized access to these tools and the

information they contain – say, from a Web portal – is often

important to organizations that are trying to ensure performance

and security across a number of distributed sites.

Let’s take a look at each of the tool types.

Five Basic Types of Network Management

Key Tools for Maximizing your Hybrid Cloud Investments 5

Packet prioritization. Application

performance management can

be thought of as traffic shaping or

traffic management. Quality-of-

service (QoS) and class-of-service

(CoS) capabilities are subsets of

traffic management that allow

you to prioritize and control the

resources each application packet

gets as it traverses the WAN

according to your own business

policies. For example, you’ll likely

use QoS/CoS settings to ensure

that real-time voice-over-IP (VoIP)

traffic always goes to the head of

the packet queue. VoIP usually

gets top priority to ensure minimal

packet loss and delay, which can

impede the quality of a phone call.

Traffic classification and deep

packet inspection. Application

performance management

requires that you are able to

discern which application each

packet belongs to, so you can

classify each app and give

it the appropriate policy for

prioritization and resources.

Tools with deep packet

inspection (DPI) capabilities allow

you to see into the IP packet

header to identify the packet

type, then classify it for the

appropriate priority treatment

according to your policies.

Application Performance Management

Rate limiting. Another traffic

management tool, called rate

limiting, allows you to apportion

maximum amounts of bandwidth

for specific types of traffic. You

can do this either by percentage

of total bandwidth on the link or by

actual bandwidth (bits per second).

For example, you might dedicate

a significant portion of bandwidth

to serve your most mission-critical

apps. And you might set a fairly low

cap on the capacity you ever make

available to your lowest-priority

traffic, such as that generated by

consumer applications like Yahoo!

or Facebook. You can change the

policies based on time of day, too,

to ensure that lower-priority apps

don’t edge out more important ones

during the busiest times of the day.

HTTP apps. However,

it’s important to note that,

increasingly, more and more

applications have been developed

for the Web. As such, are viewed

by traditional DPI systems as

simply “HTTP” apps, because

they have HTTP port 80

associated with them. So port-

based application classification

alone is no longer sufficient; there

could be any number of sub-

application types within the HTTP

header. So your app performance

management tool needs to be

able to recognize and classify

each app based on its known

characteristics within HTTP.

Key Tools for Maximizing your Hybrid Cloud Investments 6

The goal is two-fold:

1. to keep congestion off your WAN to boost throughput for great

user app experiences, and

2. to allow you to defer investments in additional bandwidth by

optimizing the use of the bandwidth you already have.

WAN optimization tools can be purchased in a variety of form

factors, including managed network services, special network

appliances, and integrated directly into WAN routers.

The technologies used with WAN optimization tools to reduce

WAN traffic loads include the following:

• Data compression to shrink the footprint of the data set being

transmitted

• Elimination of redundant data that’s transmitted repeatedly to

compress the transmission footprint further

• Acceleration of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) –

the transport-layer protocol used in Internet transmissions –

without you having to modify your applications

• Caching of repeatedly accessed data in a place nearer to users

so that app requests don’t have continually have to make

round trips across the WAN

• Bandwidth on demand, a capability usually sold as a network

service or feature of a network service. It allows you to “burst” your

network throughput to higher speeds during peak traffic periods to

avoid congestion and also to avoid having to spend extra money

each month for capacity that sits idle much of the time.

WAN OptimizationThese tools streamline the traffic you send across the WAN.

Key Tools for Maximizing your Hybrid Cloud Investments 7

There are security measures incumbent on your cloud provider,

your WAN provider, and your own organization to protect against

data breaches and malware. As you are setting up your hybrid

cloud, investigate whether your intended cloud provider(s) has

taken the proper security measures to protect information. If your

service is an MPLS IP-VPN, you have certain security measures

built in, such as partitioning from other traffic.

Encryption. If you are using an Internet connection all the way to

the cloud, you’ll likely want to encrypt your traffic using IP Security

(IPsec), an industry standard. Encryption does increase network

your overhead. If you are using an MPLS IP-VPN service, think

twice about encrypting; if you decide to do so, check with your

network service provider about its impact on your performance

SLAs. If using the Internet, consider WAN routers with hardware-

based encryption acceleration to speed things up.

Authentication and access control. MPLS IP-VPN services will

have authentication capabilities built in to control who has access

to your resources. When building a network on top of the Internet,

though, anyone could pretend to be part of the network. You can

use the Internet Key Exchange (IKE or IKEv2) protocol within IPsec

to counteract this. Your WAN router authenticates itself to your

headend network (in your data center or cloud service) in one of two

ways: using a preshared key (PSK), such as a password, or a public

key infrastructure (PKI), which makes use of digital certificates.

Firewalling and intrusion detection/prevention. Another best

practice is to use a firewall, configured with your rules and policies

as to what traffic will be allowed on your WAN. Firewall products

and services usually integrate unified threat management (UTM)

services, which scan for known malware. They filter or quarantine any

suspicious packets from your production network to ensure that your

organization is protected from denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

Security Management

Key Tools for Maximizing your Hybrid Cloud Investments 8

You’ll likely use a hybrid of private and public cloud services at

some point for the agility and breadth of resources they offer your

organization. In addition to investigating any cloud availability and

performance guarantees your provider might offer, be sure to

consider how your WAN will perform. You’ll come to rely heavily on

WAN links for supporting your access to and from the cloud, so it

needs to be available and congestion-free.

Part of the equation in getting user application experiences to

excel when using the WAN to access cloud resources is the speed

and caliber of the WAN services you purchase. You can also do

a strong job of controlling your WAN traffic yourself by deploying

tools – either on your premises or in the network as a hosted

service – that shape and reduce traffic loads. Monitoring, alerts,

and alarms will keep you in the know about what’s happening on

the network and whether your immediate attention is required. The

measure of automation that newer performance management and

WAN optimization tools offer is particularly valuable for scaling

your network management capabilities as your WAN extends

beyond your corporate sites into any number of cloud services.

We also recommend that you visit XO’s Network Enabled Cloud

page to learn about the elements that comprise an intelligent

network.

Summary

This ebook is sponsored by XO Communications.

About XO Communications:

XO Communications is a leading nationwide provider of

advanced IP communications, intelligent networking, and cloud

computing services for business, large enterprise and wholesale

customers. These customers include more than half of the

Fortune 500, in addition to leading cable, mobile wireless and

domestic and international telecommunications companies.

XO offers a superior customer experience through its innovative

solutions, its employees’ focus on customers and the proven

performance of its advanced network. To learn more about

XO Communications, visit www.xo.com or blog.xo.com.

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