Skip to main content Skip to search
Start Your Free Trial
Blog

Hybrid Cloud and Multi-Cloud Polynimbus Policy Enforcement

Enterprises are moving steadily to hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. For some, the goal is to reduce potential service disruptions such as communications outages and DDoS attacks and improve disaster recovery. Others want the ability to arbitrage cloud pricing and to leverage dynamic capacity scale-out. But along with these benefits comes a new challenge: Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud management.

A10 Networks’ Polynimbus Secure Application Services Architecture is designed to make hybrid and multi-cloud environments resilient and scalable with centralized security policy enforcement that simplifies management and operations.

Hybrid and multi-cloud architectures come in many forms, from a simple hybrid solution with a private data center connected to a public cloud such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Oracle Cloud, to a public cloud plus another public cloud such as Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, to more complex hybrid cloud and multi-cloud configurations with a private datacenter plus two or more public clouds. The problem is that as these architectures become more complex, offering greater flexibility and pricing leverage, the management challenges increase.

Global Multi-cloud Survey

Business Performance Innovation (BPI) Network in partnership with A10 Networks, has conducted a global survey of IT and business executives to understand their intentions, priorities, and concerns about managing in a multi-cloud world.

Polynimbus Approach: How to Manage a Multi-Cloud Application Delivery Effectively?

This webinar session demonstrates the benefits of having an application delivery controller (ADC) in a multi-cloud application service deployment by leveraging global server load balancing (GSLB), centralized policy enforcement, flexible form factors, and analytics.

Watch Now

 
The challenges of multi-cloud management are the result of having to coordinate different cloud architectures, command structures, instrumentation, and diagnostics. Without a comprehensive, consistent, and single-view multi-cloud management system to control workloads and enforce policies, it’s a lot like juggling bowling balls. And when critical service events occur such as unexpected slowdowns, it can be like juggling bowling balls that are on fire while wearing a blindfold.

Consider “cloud bursting,” where an application that normally runs in a private cloud or in a data center needs additional resources. For example, in an ecommerce environment experiencing a Black Friday sales surge more webservers might be needed so the application “bursts” into a public cloud and uses the external services to fulfill the resource requirements. Once the surge is reduced, the extra resources are released and normal on-premises service resumes.

Application Services with Cloud Bursting

In this example, applications running in the on-premises data center are also staged in a public cloud. In each cloud there is an advanced load balancer, the A10 Thunder® Application Delivery Controller (ADC). Based on rules defined in the A10 Harmony® Controller, global server load balancing (GLSB) is reconfigured to “spin up” off-premises resources when a demand threshold such as a response time is exceeded.

The A10 Harmony Controller also provides unified traffic analytics to deliver a comprehensive picture of hybrid and multi-cloud performance and ensures that security policies are enforced across all clouds and availability domains within public clouds. This means that multiple instances of the A10 Thunder Web Application Firewall are spread across multiple clouds and have their rule-sets synchronized so that security policies are uniformly and consistently applied and violations are detected, reported, and tracked in real time.

With A10 Networks Polynimbus approach, multi-cloud, and hybrid cloud deployments don’t have to be management nightmares.

How A10 Can Help

A10 Networks Thunder ADC, Harmony Controller, and Thunder Web Application Firewall provide a market-leading multi-cloud policy enforcement and control infrastructure that is flexible, cost effective, and sophisticated enough to manage even the most complex Polynimbus configurations.