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February 1, 2017

Top Five Cloud Migration Challenges for Enterprises – and How to Solve Them

By Fady Masoud
 Product & Field Marketing

Driven by the need for greater productivity and lower costs, enterprises around the globe are moving their applications to the cloud. Today, nine out of 10 enterprises use at least one cloud application—not surprising when you consider that 84 percent of CIOs report they have cut application costs by moving to the cloud.1 Driven by the need for scalable bandwidth to support the proliferation of large volumes of digital content and applications, enterprises are turning to a new hybrid cloud network model, with applications delivered from a cloud services layer that bridges private and public cloud infrastructures.  As they migrate mission-critical applications to this new environment, enterprises are discovering the value of interconnecting their infrastructure with secure, flexible, cloud scale optical transport networks.

Top Five Enterprise Cloud Migration Challenges

Fierce competition, shrinking budgets and cyber-attacks are top-of-mind at any enterprise today due to their direct impact on the health of the business. The top five cloud migration challenges for enterprises today include:

  1. Decreasing cost of operations: The need for bandwidth traditionally means more complexity and increased operational expense. Costs driven by migration to the cloud include capital expenditures for fiber, training and deployment of additional equipment that often lead to increased network complexity.
  1. Minimizing downtime: Network outages can be disastrous to enterprises, resulting in significant loss of revenue and massive disruption to business operations, adversely impacting customer loyalty. Average downtime costs vary across industries, from approximately $90,000 per hour in the media sector to about $6.48 million per hour for large online brokerages, according to Information Management magazine.2
  1. Protecting enterprise data: Cyber-attacks and data breaches are increasing at an alarming rate. The annual damage to the US economy caused by cyber-attacks is estimated to be $100 billion,3 making security in cloud architectures a top priority.
  1. Scaling the network: Most businesses cannot afford to wait the traditional 45 to 60 days for service providers to implement a simple network bandwidth increase. Enterprise IT and planning teams need the ability to build and grow the network on-demand, to manage changes real-time.
  1. Enhancing network performance: Applications that run in the cloud demand the same performance as those running on local servers. They demand low latency, high throughput and high availability. Moreover, they must be agile to handle the need for dynamic bandwidth and changes in network topology, including connectivity to new offices or data centers.

Overcoming Enterprise Challenges with Infinera Intelligent Transport Networks

Overcoming these challenges requires an intelligent optical network that offers the flexibility and scalability needed to meet bandwidth demand, and that ensures the highest levels of availability and security—all while lowering operating costs.

Infinera delivers the benefits of intelligent optical networking to enterprises with high-performance Intelligent Transport Networks. From connecting employees for better collaboration and productivity to protecting mission-critical information during both normal times and major disasters, the need for connectivity with the highest levels of performance across any distance puts the network at the heart of the enterprise migration to the cloud. Infinera Intelligent Transport Networks are powered by a unique family of optical engines,  the industry’s only optical engines built using a tiny photonic integrated circuit (PIC), for lower power and higher density. Using Infinera Intelligent Transport Networks, enterprises around the globe can scale their networks to meet the surging demand for bandwidth, accelerate service turn-up, and simplify network operations for significantly lower operating costs. Infinera designs and delivers Intelligent Transport Networks to underpin enterprises’ migration to the cloud around the following four principles:

  • Security: Infinera Intelligent Transport Networks include platforms that protect enterprises’ mission-critical data from intruders and hacking tools with features like centralized authentication and authorization, wire-speed encryption and stringent access procedures.
Data Transport Protection Through Encryption
  • Simplicity: Optical networking is not a core competency for most enterprises, so Infinera Intelligent Transport Networks are designed to dramatically simplify network implementation, design and operation with features like zero-touch provisioning, network auto-discovery and intuitive graphical user interfaces. Infinera Intelligent Transport Networks enable in-service upgrades that typically can be accomplished with software using a plug-and-play process compared to other optical solutions that require forklift upgrades and long testing procedures.
  • Efficiency: Designed to address enterprises’ main imperatives around reducing operating costs, Infinera Intelligent Transport Networks offer low power consumption (as low as 0.2 watts per gigabit per second [Gb/s] on the XTM Series), high density in a small footprint (saving scarce floor space) and on-demand network capacity (Infinera Instant Bandwidth), enabling enterprises to significantly reduce recurring costs, in part by eliminating unnecessary capital expenditures.
  • Network Reliability: Downtime is virtually eliminated thanks to Infinera smart features that reduce errors caused by humans, equipment failure or natural disasters. A key benefit of the Infinite Capacity Engine is the reliability of the Infinera PIC. Other features include an intelligent control plane that automatically routes data traffic through alternative network paths to avoid any service interruption after a network failure, and sophisticated network design to provide maximum availability of vital enterprise links.

The network has never been more vital to enterprise success than it is today. The technology innovation powering Infinera Intelligent Transport Networks unlocks the scalability required for cloud applications and protects critical information from intruders and hacking tools, while driving a massive reduction in operating costs. Whether the objective is to increase scalability, improve network performance or lower network costs, there is a right-sized Infinera platform for migrating applications to the cloud.

For more information, click here to contact Infinera.

Related links:

Sources

[1] http://www.irms360.com/blog_post/state_cloud_2015_supply_chain_adopters_reaping_roi_rewards

[2] http://www.information-management.com/infodirect/2009_133/downtime_cost-10015855-1.html

[3] http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/security-risk/infographic-the-cost-of-cyber-attacks-in-the-us/96087.article

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