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Glossary of Terms

What is a Polynimbus (Multi-cloud) Environment?

It’s a Multi-Cloud World

As cloud technology has evolved, we’ve seen web applications migrate from data centers to hosted on a single cloud to hosted across multiple clouds. These clouds may be public clouds such as Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or private clouds. There are three main reasons why organizations are embracing a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments:

  • It’s an opportunity to improve web application response and network latency by minimizing the number of hops between users in a region and the web service infrastructure
  • Organizations can improve availability and reliability through global load balancing across multiple clouds
  • It can Provide flexible and cost-managed scale-out compute power to meet user demand spikes

… And Organizations are Embracing It

According to the global survey “Mapping the Multi-Cloud Enterprise” conducted by the Business Performance Innovation (BPI) Network in partnership with A10, approximately two-thirds of enterprises have deployed their application delivery platforms across two or more public clouds, with 84 percent expecting to increase their reliance on public clouds or private clouds over the next 24 months.

But maximizing the benefits of this new network application delivery service design has been difficult. Only 11 percent of the companies surveyed believed their programs had been “highly successful.” The top challenges the other organizations identified included security, lack of IT talent, and effectively management of multi-cloud complexity.

“There is also an unprecedented need for deeper visibility and real-time insights into application traffic, particularly for cloud-based applications and cloud-native environments, where dynamic and often ephemeral microservices require pervasive application-layer observability. Modernized security and [application delivery controller] technologies are capable of playing an integral role in helping enterprises realize the full array of multi-cloud benefits as they move to a multi-cloud (or Polynimbus) application services environment, especially in an era when applications – supported by agile and flexible application-delivery infrastructure – are more important to business success than ever before.” – Brad Casemore, Vice President, Datacenter Networks, IDC Research.

Mapping the multi-cloud enterprise

Polynimbus (Multi-Cloud) Application Delivery in Financial Networks

Financial institutions must take a Polynimbus approach to master their multi-cloud, and on-premise environments to ease the operational overhead while securing their applications and data, ultimately offering their users access and convenience.

Read the Report

 

Polynimbus: The Cloud Application Services Blueprint

To address these challenges, A10 Networks has developed a Polynimbus application delivery services blueprint for multi-cloud environments. This blueprint defines a way forward for organizations to bridge the gaps created by diverse application environments. It can enable greater simplicity, agility, consistent manageability, and security for organizations as they tackle the complexities of a multi-cloud world. The nine key areas of the Polynimbus blueprint are:

  • Full software and cloud support
  • Full secure services stack
  • Flexible and portable licenses
  • Any-cloud central management
  • Central visibility and reporting
  • Cloud selection and redundancy
  • Fully SecOps and DevOps ready
  • Broader ecosystem integrations
  • Flexible architecture and software scale-out

The Polynimbus secure application delivery services blueprint covers secure operations considerations, the most impactful current and emerging multi-cloud technologies, migration from on-premises hardware and software to the cloud, and the requirements to ensure a successful pivot of operations across a multi-cloud environment.

Global Survey: Mapping the Multi-Cloud Enterprise

A large majority of survey respondents report their organizations have increased their commitment to the cloud over the past two years, including some 52 percent who characterize their efforts as either “aggressively moving toward a cloud-first strategy” or “making significant progress” toward adopting the cloud as a key part of their IT strategy.

Most others view themselves as making steady progress, or at least cautious adoption. Some half of all respondents say they have already moved at least 30 percent of their enterprise applications to the cloud and 35 percent say they have moved more than half of all enterprise applications onto the cloud.

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How A10 Can Help

A10’s high-performance Polynimbus secure application delivery services are provided by our Thunder® Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and Thunder® Convergent Firewall (CFW), with analytics and management provided by A10 Harmony® Controller. Thunder ADC and Thunder CFW are available in virtual, bare metal, container-based and hardware form factors. Flexible and portable licensing is available with FlexPool®.

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