News
NTT Introduces CloudWAN to Deliver Cloud-Ready Enterprise Networks Starting from South Africa and Japan
May 2017 by Marc Jacob
NTT Innovation Institute Inc. (NTT i3), a prominent Silicon Valley innovation center for NTT Group, and Internet Solutions (IS), the leading pan-African telecoms services provider, NTT PC Communications (NTTPC), a network service and communication solution provider in Japan, announced today global collaboration on the delivery of CloudWAN.
A collaborative, worldwide development effort across several members of the NTT Group, CloudWAN combines both software-defined Wide Area Network technology (SD-WAN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) into one environment, enabling enterprise customers to deliver advanced services to the computing edge.
CloudWAN delivers an enhanced user experience, powerful flexibility and agility to NTT’s enterprise customers. With CloudWAN, enterprise customers can maintain and deliver high quality services, consistent policies and robust security.
NTT is uniquely able to leverage the strengths and global presence of its operating companies to develop an open, agile product that weaves SD-WAN and NFV functionality into an intelligent service delivery fabric that drives rapid growth and expansion while minimizing network costs, reducing complexity and increasing control.
Today’s enterprises must adapt to successfully achieve digital transformation, cloud-based consumption and infrastructure convergence. These paradigm shifts require a radically different approach to networking. CloudWAN offers enterprises a simple, three-step journey designed to modernize their network and transform their business.
1: Decouple Physical Assets and Develop a Virtualized Service Plane
As a first step, CloudWAN delivers a platform to link public and private clouds and on premise infrastructures into a single, seamless virtual network. This new virtualized service plane provides the capability to then extend network services across the enterprise in a controlled and consistent way.
2: Migrate Ecosystem to Virtualized Service Plane
With a virtualized service plane in place, enterprises can now deploy third party virtualized network functions (NFV) such as firewall and WAN acceleration onto the unified virtual network, eliminating the need to send highly skilled network administrators onsite to manage the rollout.
3: Focus Beyond Connectivity Services
The third step is where enterprises truly transform their business with the ability to rapidly deliver applications and services to the edge. In this case, necessary applications and services can be instantly deployed to user communities at the edges of the network.
The result of this modernization is that enterprise customers can now proactively plan for network needs, while also managing their existing infrastructure investments. Similarly, enterprise cloud operators running a wide range of traditional enterprise applications from multiple vendors or cloud-native workloads can flexibly consolidate their application silos into one universal data infrastructure.
CloudWAN: Features and Benefits
FEATURES
• Unified Virtual Network for linking public and private clouds, and on-premises infrastructure
• Management support of infrastructure, network functions, and applications from a single cloud-based console
• Extensible Network Functions provided by software that interoperates with the core virtual network
• Integration of Business Applications and Services from the cloud to the edge of the network
• Modularity and simplicity to scale distributed IT environment
• Micro-service architecture for connected devices
• Ecosystem of other network function providers that allow CloudWAN to flexibly fit into an existing enterprise IT landscape without disrupting prior infrastructure investments
• Seamless unification of disparate network deployments
• Site in a Box solution to standardize network technologies across diverse global locations or to streamline complex networks across various business units
BENEFITS
COST:
_• Reduce setup and service costs of network products and apps
• Reduce bandwidth cost by enabling alternate transport networks
COMPLEXITY:
• Easier device management with network functions as a service on a single appliance
• Reduce burden on overloaded subject matter experts
• Easier network monitoring, debugging, and troubleshooting
CONTROL:
• Improve ability to rapidly deploy centralized changes to the network edges
CloudWAN Services from NTT Group Companies
Internet Solutions (South Africa): CloudWAN Launch on June 8th
CloudWAN is a unified, virtual WAN and network function solution that simplifies the way you manage your network. The network essentially functions as a service on a single device, so you need just one device at each location instead of a complicated arrangement of network hardware. With CloudWAN, you no longer need to ship network devices, servers and applications to new sites. Even your skilled engineers can stay where they are and set up site-to-site VPN remotely.
"It is critical that we provide our clients with a high performance, highly resilient network solution," said Saki Missaikos, Managing Director, Internet Solutions. "Having an open ecosystem available to develop an adaptable platform that can morph along with rapidly developing technology changes and market needs is critical. Leveraging NTT i3’s CloudWAN SD-WAN controller and ecosystem allows us to offer a high speed, reliable enterprise service to local enterprises."
