What Network Cloud Technology Allows Business to Do

Network clouds allow internet-enabled organizations to set up their own network infrastructure without having to procure any hardware. With a network cloud provisioned from a reputable vendor, you can benefit from substantial cost savings and offload the task of managing your network from your IT staff. Moreover, you can scale your network on demand, without being tied to any one vendor.

What Is a Network Cloud, and How Did It Develop?

Since traditional networks rely, for the most part, on proprietary hardware, they can be costly to set up. This is especially true when your network requirements expand.

Also known as Network as a Service (NaaS), a network cloud is similar to the main 3 types of cloud computing models, which are Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). When an organization deploys a network cloud, it contracts the services of a third-party provider offering cloud-based network services.

Network clouds trace their origins to the advent of software-defined networking (SDN) and other technologies such as network function virtualization in the early 2000s. Based on these ground-breaking principles, providers designed an abstraction layer, or a hypervisor, to run network functions on top of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. With the hypervisor, COTS hardware was pooled together into network clouds that vendors then provided to their clients for a fee.

Thus, clients get to have their own networks, even if they don’t have any actual network infrastructure deployed on-premises. Providers are in charge of deploying and maintaining the network cloud on behalf of the client, with the only requirement being internet connectivity.

The Importance behind Cloud Network Technology

Businesses nowadays depend on the cloud to increase scalability, establish differentiation, speed up time to market, and foster agility. The modern corporation now builds and delivers applications using the cloud model as the de facto method.

When using cloud networking, the network can either be fully cloud-based or cloud-enabled.

The network is on-premises in cloud-enabled networking, but part or all of the resources required to administer it are in the cloud. Packet forwarding, routing, and data are still handled internally for the core network architecture, but cloud services are used for network administration, monitoring, maintenance, and security. Using a SaaS-based firewall to secure an on-premises network is one illustration.

The whole network is in the cloud with cloud-based networking. Hardware and network management tools fall under this category. Connectivity between applications and resources distributed in the cloud is provided via cloud-based networking.

Desirable Characteristics

An optimal network cloud has the following distinguishing characteristics:

Dis-aggregation between hardware and software: As explained in the previous section, the hypervisor drives the network that runs on top of the COTS hardware. The two are decoupled so that the software can run on any hardware.
Distributed processing: The forwarding and routing of data packets is divided into two separate processes, with routing distributable to one or more controllers. Moreover, since the hypervisor is native to the cloud, network functions can be distributed across the infrastructure using containers.
Multiple-instance and multi-vendor support: Several instances of network functions can be run on top of hardware provided by any vendor.
Network processing unit (NPU) optimization: Network-intensive tasks are offloaded to more powerful networking-specific integrated circuits (ICs).
More efficient networks: Network services are fully orchestrated and automated, making them easier to manage than traditional networks.

Network Cloud Benefits

These benefits include:

Flexibility and customizability: With software driving network changes, networks can be reconfigured on demand without the need to add any hardware.
Scalability: Instead of adding more hardware, you can just buy more capacity from your cloud provider in case you need to scale your network. This also means no hardware vendor lock-in.
Lower costs: Cloud-based services are generally more affordable than buying new hardware.
Easy, secure access from anywhere: You can contract your cloud provider to provide secure access to your network. In addition, your users don’t need to go through a virtual private network (VPN) when accessing your network—all they have to is enter their logon credentials, giving you full cloud network security.
No maintenance: Your cloud provider is in charge of maintaining your network. Thus, you get to save on maintenance costs and shift your IT team to other tasks.

Popular Providers

The network cloud market exceeded $5 billion in 2018. It is forecasted to reach $10.4 billion by the end of 2021.

The gamut of network cloud providers ranges from major cloud players such as Amazon and Rackspace to telephony companies such as AT&T, Level 3 Communications and Verizon. Providers that specialize in network clouds for enterprise networks include Akamai, Cloudflare, Cisco and Palo Alto Networks.

Given the large number of providers, when selecting a vendor, make sure that the services they are offering are a close fit to your requirements.

Parallels RAS Supports High Availability Load Balancing Out of the Box

Parallels® Remote Application Server (RAS) allows organizations to optimize available server resources, maximize throughput and minimize response times through High Availability Load Balancing (HALB). HALB distributes data traffic among remote desktop servers and gateways with resource-based distribution (user sessions, memory and CPU). Third-party load balancers, such as AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) and Azure Load Balancers, are also supported.

With resource-based load balancing, Parallels RAS distributes traffic between servers dynamically and reconnects disconnected servers automatically to ensure that no data is lost when a connection gets broken. On the other hand, round-robin load balancing means it uses a rotational mechanism to load balance network connections, for example, connecting an incoming request to the first available server, then another request to the next server, and so on.

Moreover, you can use the Parallels RAS RDSH template to dynamically scale your Remote Desktop Session Hosts (RDSHs) up or down by creating or removing RDSH servers on demand. This capability means less effort in reducing excess traffic within your network.

Download the trial to see how you can implement load balancing in your environment using Parallels RAS.

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