Fibre1000: The Ultimate Weapon In Cloud Migration
by Chris Bateman
24
1000 Megabits per second equates to 125 Megabytes per second. That’s 1 Gigabyte in 8 seconds!
With the launch of Fibre1000, small business decision makers are questioning why they would ever need such a huge amount of bandwidth. There are a lot of statistics designed for the residential market but from a business perspective, the only business that cares that your entire Netflix show downloads in 3 seconds is, well, Netflix.
For a business, 1000Mbps is a magic number because it is the typical speed at which your average business local network runs. Most businesses run Gigabit networks because their users tend to run multiple applications, all accessing multiple data sources concurrently. Multiply this across numerous users and the figures add up quickly.
Bearing this in mind, it comes as no surprise when companies say they are keen on migrating to a cloud platform but are concerned about performance degradation for their local users. This can be taken care of using network optimisations that combine Quality of Service (QoS) and traffic prioritisation, but such optimisations can produce noticeable negative effects like delays on and caching copies of frequently used data. These optimisations help, but it doesn’t change the fact that your 160MBps Hard Disk Drive read/write speed (550MBps if you have an SSD drive) is limited to 6MBps (based on a 50Mbps connection). With Fibre1000 this is no longer the case. The limiting factor of your WAN or Internet connection speed is now removed, the cloud server infrastructure may as well be on your local network.
With Fibre1000, the limiting factor of your Internet connection speed is now removed. Your cloud server infrastructure may as well be on your local network.
The next step is to tailor your solution to your business needs and once again, Fibre1000 is flexible enough to help. All too often businesses simply purchase a typical Internet connection and then forget about it. Everything you need is on the Internet, so why over-complicate it? The answer to this is very much yes and no. The Internet for a business is a method of accessing data located outside your business premises; this could be public resources, your own servers collocated in a data centre, a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering or a Voice over IP (VoIP) service. The yes side is that these resources can be accessed over the public internet. The no side is that the public internet is not always the best way to get there.
A perfect example of this is connecting to AWS or Azure cloud infrastructure. This is likely to be business infrastructure running critical applications and potentially sensitive data. You can access this data via the public Internet, but in doing so you do not have control over the route your data takes between you and AWS. The path taken by your data can change and be convoluted, passing through public routing equipment which is unknown to you or your provider. To counter this, you can encrypt your communication which adds security at the cost of performance as the encryption and decryption process takes time. The best way to access this infrastructure is via an AWS ‘Direct Connect’ or Azure ‘Express Route’. This is a dedicated connection routed from your site straight to the cloud servers using a static and known path that is not on public routing infrastructure. Therefore, your data is secure and fast. There is a cost for this but what many people overlook is the reduced cost of data retrieval from cloud platforms which is charged per Megabyte (MB) by the platform provider. This means adding an AWS or Azure connection to the Fibre1000 product can be cost neutral or even save money.
This example can be played out with almost every cloud service, colocation or VoIP scenario and the end result of a well-designed Fibre1000 implementation is a business that is using the cloud in the most effective and secure way possible.
Want to know more? Why not look around our website and see if there’s a product or service which your business can benefit from. We provide business-grade telecommunications and managed IT services at highly competitive rates, and would love to provide a comprehensive quote personalised to your business.
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