Centurion, 18 Jan 2022
In today’s world, enterprises are undergoing increasing pressure to innovate rapidly, to keep up with competition and to increase IT agility to meet customer demands. To achieve these goals, businesses are choosing different infrastructure environments for deploying different types of applications. Some applications may be best suited to be hosted on-premises, whereas other applications may be best suited to be hosted in a public cloud, and yet others may benefit from hybrid deployments. In fact, hybrid cloud is becoming the new normal for many businesses.
However, in a hybrid cloud environment, it is becoming more and more challenging to maintain a homogeneous enterprise operational model, comply with corporate security policies and gain visibility across hybrid environments.
Digital transformation does not just simply happen; it requires transformation in processes, culture and technology. The network connects everything together, it is the foundation for change. Success in digital transformation requires network transformation first. The end goal of digital transformation is customer satisfaction.
The digital transformation of the business requires a sound base to operate from. Existing networking environments in both the campus and the data centre lack the flexibility, security and performance to support use cases the business requires for digital transformation. Without network transformation, the task of digital transformation becomes much harder. Roll-outs of business-critical applications are slowed, response times to customers will continue to lag, and changes to business processes to enable more efficient operations become much more difficult.
Organisations have become ambitious for an innovative approach in the form of cloud-centric networks to link their content and communication services. With the big push towards cloud services, network providers are now required to deliver innovative cloud-centric networking models to serve cloud-centric businesses. Making an on-demand, secure, agile and configurable interface a pre-requisite offering. IT teams looking to outsource the network side of the puzzle should focus on application quality of experience (QOE) and quality of service (QOS) with considerable scalability.
The Data Networks team within BCX has been assisting customers for many years to design, deploy, optimise, secure and manage network infrastructure for migrating workloads to public clouds like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), and to service provider hosted clouds, such as BCX’s own software-defined networking enabled data centres.
For hybrid cloud networking, BCX offers Cisco Cloud ACI that allows customers running Cisco ACI in their on-premises data centres to extend their Cisco Cloud ACI policies to public clouds. Cisco Cloud Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco Cloud ACI) is a comprehensive solution that provides simplified operations, consistent policy management and visibility across multiple on-premises data centres and public clouds or hybrid cloud environments. Cisco Cloud ACI manages multiple cloud regions, from a single instance of Cisco’s Cloud Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), and enables consistent policy, security and operations through secure interconnects for a multi-cloud environment. Cisco’s Cloud ACI also allows BCX clients running on ACI in any of BCX’s nine data centres to extend ACI capabilities into public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and AWS seamlessly. Clients are able to run a hybrid cloud model with a hosted private cloud solution in the BCX data centre with a cloud extension into, for example, Azure.
BCX offers this service in South Africa and through leading global network providers, to clouds across the world.
BCX has over 200 network, security and cloud certified engineers countrywide to design and manage end-to-end secure cloud-centric networking solutions.
For assistance with cloud networking requirements, please contact your BCX account manager or sales representative, or contact us on Cisco Cloud ACI.
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BCX
At BCX, we pride ourselves on being an end-to-end digital partner for corporates and governments across the African continent. As a wholly owned subsidiary of the Telkom Group, we were established through the strategic alliance between South Africa’s premier information and communication technology (ICT) suppliers and a leading provider of telecommunications infra-structure, creating the digital partner of choice for clients within our chosen markets.
To do this, we combine local market understanding and industry expertise with some of the world’s most advanced ICT, together with a tireless commitment to make your unique digital journey as seamless as possible. In our endeavour to maintain our position as a digital market leader in financial services, mining, retail, healthcare, and the public sector, we continue to leverage and invest in ecosystems for scale, access, expertise, and innovation.
Headquartered in Centurion, Pretoria, BCX permanently employs circa 5 500 people, with an ongoing commitment to attracting and building talent for the future. Operating where our clients operate, our global footprint spans across South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, the United Kingdom and Zambia.