As organizations increasingly transition their workloads and business applications from on-premise data centers to one or multiple public clouds and take advantage of SaaS offerings, networking becomes a challenge. While computing and storage have long inherited cloud attributes and have evolved to become available for as-a-service consumption, networking has not. It is time for the network to evolve. It is time for the network to be reinvented for the cloud with the following key attributes:
- Delivered as-a-service with easy point-and-click consumption and no need for cloud-specific network expertise
- On-demand with ubiquitous ability to be deployed when, where, and for as long as needed
- Global and multi-cloud connecting on-premise locations to public clouds and SaaS applications, as well as interconnecting multiple public cloud regions or multiple public clouds together
- Secure with integrated security and network services and the ability to seamlessly insert these services into the desired application flows and provide full operational life-cycle management
- Elastically scalable with the ability to accommodate real-time growing or shrinking demands for network and network service capacity
- Highly available with SLAs to accelerate the transition of business-critical applications to the cloud
- Transparent with full visibility, monitoring, and comprehensive day-2 operations
