Forward Enterprise Zone to Zone Connectivity Matrix

If you’re like most of the complex IT shops we talk with, you probably don’t even have a current security matrix to store anywhere – file cabinet or data folder. The connectivity matrix is essentially the company security posture, but almost no one has a comprehensive way to visualize and easily understand the connectivity status between the various configured security policies (zone-to-zone policies). This puts them in a dangerous position of risk because you can’t fix what you don’t know is broken.

The lack of precise insight into which firewall zones should or shouldn’t have connectivity with other zones undermines basic network security. And zero trust? Good luck implementing and enforcing that stringent security approach. Without visibility into interzone connectivity, it’s a near-impossible feat — especially because networks are always growing and changing.

Your network teams and security engineers can now use the Forward Enterprise platform to access a graphical representation of security zone connectivity. They can get a current view of the complex zone-to-zone interactions occurring in your network presented in one easy-to-understand visualization. It only takes a glance to see which zones have full, partial, or zero connectivity; color-coded status indicators to represent flow outcomes, so teams can confirm compliance at a glance:

How simple is that? Now, your teams can have a single source of truth for interzone connectivity and policy compliance that’s always up to date and always super clear. Check out our use case to learn more about how our easy-to-use, zone-to-zone connectivity matrix feature in the Forward Enterprise platform can help you confirm that your interzone connectivity posture is sound and that you’re ready to start building a zero trust environment.

When your organization is inevitably hit by a cyberattack, you want your security operations engineers to move lightning fast to identify the scope, duration, and impact of the attack, contain the disruption and prevent any costly or lasting damage. To do that, they need access to actionable information about everything that’s in your network — where devices are located, how they interact, and all the relevant details about their configuration and state.

Insight for Security Engineers

Security teams need this insight so they can isolate devices and cut off all possible pathways that attackers might travel to reach your critical assets. But do your teams have that insight at their fingertips? Or is it trapped in spreadsheets, bogged down by other time-consuming, manual processes, or simply, impossible to get to? If it’s the latter, you’re allowing attackers to have the upper hand.

Now, imagine if your security operations pros had an “easy button” they could hit whenever attackers strike, which would allow them to contain and remediate cyber threats ultra-fast? Even better, what if they could use that easy button to help ensure hosts aren’t vulnerable to attack in the first place?

No need to wonder, “What if?” This easy button exists. It’s the blast radius identification and isolation feature we recently added to the Forward Enterprise platform.

Blast Radius Identification in a Single Click

The blast radius feature uses data about your network that our platform already collects. Blast radius enables security teams — with a single mouse click — to identify the full reach of a compromised host and then isolate exposed devices swiftly.

Many of our customers had told us their security teams could benefit from having access to the same searchable, actionable information about their network topology and behavior that their network engineers use every day. That feedback inspired us to develop and deliver this brand-new feature to help security teams be even more effective in their work to protect the enterprise — especially during a crisis.

Want to learn more about the blast radius for identification and isolation feature in Forward Enterprise? Check out this use case to see how easy this “easy button” truly is.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to attend two technology events IN PERSON!!! Seeing people “mask-to-mask” has been fun and educational.   

Forward Networks recently exhibited at Black Hat in Las Vegas and AFCEA TechNet Augusta. Obviously, security was the topic at Black Hat, but it was also top of mind for TechNet attendees, and attendees at both events stressed the need for better network behavioral insight. A common theme amongst these totally different demographics speaks volumes about the need to improve how NetOps and SecOps share network insights to protect its health and integrity. (For those who are unfamiliar, the halls of Black Hat are filled with hackers while TechNet Augusta hosted U.S. Army technical experts).  

Obtaining current, detailed information presented in an easy to understand manner is critical for network health. Because SecOps and NetOps teams need the same network information to remediate and prevent incidents, there should be a seamless way to interact. Unfortunately, that’s not possible using most currently available tools. Engineers are stuck making calls, sending emails, opening tickets, and waiting for information that should be at their fingertips, thus creating unnecessary speedbumps. In June, we added security features to our platform that were specifically intended to help SecOps and InfoSec teams by creating “easy buttons” that eliminate these barriers.   

Prior to getting out and talking to the people “in the trenches,” we felt pretty good about the platform enhancements, but we also knew that the attendees at both TechNet and Black Hat would give us the unfiltered truth.  

The security features we announced in June (single-click blast radius detection, Zone-to-Zone security matrix, and an up-to-date Network CVE matrix) generated interest because they help SecOps folks work better and faster. Nobody wants to spend an unnecessary second of their work life combing through vender alerts, tracing paths, or inspecting code to find out the cause of an issue.   

While the positive reception was encouraging, what I found incredibly interesting was the level of interest in how network modeling can enhance security posture by detecting and preventing situations that traditional tools will miss because they aren’t designed with the nuances of SDN in mind.  

 What did we hear at Black Hat and TechNet Augusta?  

Well aside from schooling us on how to protect the world from Space Invaders while playing our classic Atari console, the resounding theme was when it comes to understanding and enforcing organizational security posture, the network is critical. Security engineers want to query the network in ways that traditional security tools don’t allow. SDN is changing the way threats are enacted and detected, and SecOps needs better info. 

For example, the Forward Enterprise platform can identify network-based vulnerabilities due to traffic being virtually routed around enforcement points. Since the days of mandatory physical connectivity to the firewall are in the past, it’s easy to mistakenly configure devices in a manner that allows traffic to bypass enforcement points. Manipulated packets passing through NAT may not be recognized by firewall rules, ergo traffic you think is being blocked could be permitted creating vulnerabilities or, traffic that should be permitted could be dropped, negatively impacting the user experience.  

Most of the well-known products in this space cannot detect these network-created issues because they don’t have a mathematical model of the network. Packets that are mutated in transit are unlikely to trigger the right policy response because they are unrecognizable.  

The technical practitioners I spoke with were excited to learn that not only can Forward Networks detect these types of issues, but using custom intent checks, the platform can alert engineering staff if an out-of-policy configuration change is implemented. Knowing that the platform can instantly provide correct information on policy adherence and detect out-of-policy configurations before they cause an issue was of significant interest to everyone I talked to.   

Do you believe in zero trust? 

If you work in networking, you can’t do anything without getting some sort of message that you need to improve your zero trust architecture. Lots of companies offer to sell you the solution to all of your zero trust woes.   

Because it’s been a topic of discussion internally – we decided that this was the perfect opportunity to put the hype to the test and see what people really think. So, my Seeking Truth in Networking Podcast co-host (and Forward Networks Co-Founder) Brandon and I decided to mic-up and talk to people for Episode 11: Zero Trust at Black Hat 2021: Networking meets Security. The conversations were sometimes funny and always enlightening. So, we turned it into our latest podcast. At the end of the day, yes there’s a healthy dose of skepticism – as there should be – but there are also real lessons to be learned and interesting ways people are applying these principles. 

Listen to the podcast to hear more, and tell us what you think! 

Learn more about how Forward Enterprise can help improve and protect your security posture. 

Using the visualization, verification, search, predict, and diffs function within the Forward Networks platform can help engineers ensure their zero trust architecture is designed and functioning as intended.  To learn how, read the zero trust use case.

Between us — there’s no such thing as zero trust — it’s a catchy term used to describe a very complicated approach to security. But just because marketing loves the term doesn’t mean we should ignore the concept.

The idea of zero trust is the assumption that users should be granted the least access possible to be productive, and that security should be verified at every level with consistent protection measures. No device or person can be automatically trusted and everything must be verified before providing access to systems, and policy adherence must be continually validated.

Achieving this requires full network visibility, after all, how can you protect what you cannot see? To implement a zero trust architecture, network and security operations teams must be able to fully visualize all possible data paths and network traffic behaviors to truly understand potential vulnerabilities. Only then can they implement and enforce policies that eliminate risky pathways and segment the network effectively.

In addition to visibility, validation is critical for ensuring zero trust. Security policies are definitely not a “set it and forget it” situation.  Because the network is constantly being changed by the people that manage it, consistent and frequent validation is necessary to ensure that policies are performing as intended.

While this may seem like stating the obvious, it’s anything but easy.  Most networks have evolved over decades, it’s common for our customers to discover hundreds of devices they didn’t know they had. One of the biggest frustrations we hear from security teams is the amount of config drift in their network – which prevents the security policies from functioning as intended.  If you struggle with these issues (as most enterprises do), a zero trust architecture is beyond reach.

Using the visualization, verification, search, predict, and diffs function within the Forward Networks platform can help engineers ensure their zero trust architecture is designed and functioning as intended.  To learn how, read the zero trust use case.

With the constant rise of modern cyber threats, many businesses are aiming for zero-trust infrastructure to keep themselves and their customers safe. But a zero-trust environment, where only authorized people can access information and resources, is often more difficult to implement than anticipated. If security teams and network engineers cannot visualize the network and its possible traffic paths and behaviors, they can’t possibly secure the environment.

Forward Enterprise is designed to collect detailed config and state information on the entire network and then help engineers visualize, verify, search, predict and understand diffs following change windows. This information is invaluable to companies seeking to implement zero trust as it provides detailed connectivity information in a way that is easy to consume and act upon. We’ve recently added three new features to Forward Enterprise, that curate critical security information making it easy to understand device connectivity and potential vulnerabilities.

Regardless of how large or complicated a network is, Forward Enterprise empowers IT to improve network operations and avoid outages. This is thanks to its unique mathematical model that creates a digital twin of the network, allowing network operators to map all possible traffic flows, verify intent, predict network behavior, and more.

Our platform also helps security operations professionals with new visualizations of East-West traffic flows, endpoint-to-endpoint connectivity analysis matrices, and timely non-compliance alerts. These new features for Forward Enterprise make security teams’ lives easier by simplifying and streamlining traditionally labor-intensive network processes.

Blast Radius Identification

Today it is not a question of “if” a device will be compromised – but “when.” During an attack, it is critical that security operations professionals immediately identify the full impact of compromised devices so that they can contain the threat. With Forward’s blast radius, security teams can now identify the full exposure and reach of a compromised host with a single mouse click, making isolation and remediation a much simpler and faster process.

Zone-to-Zone Connectivity Posture

Having full insight into how and where devices and applications communicate over the network is fundamental to security. And yet this is one of the most difficult security tasks to perform, with most teams working from out-of-date spreadsheets and tribal knowledge to try and figure things out manually. Unsurprisingly, this is incredibly inefficient and error-prone.

But with Forward Enterprise correlating routing information and security policies, security teams can now easily see how their security posture is enacted on the network. With a graphical matrix that clearly delineates which zones have full connectivity, partial connectivity or no connectivity, security operations professionals can have full confidence of their zone-to-zone connectivity posture.

Network OS Vulnerability Identification

Trying to stay ahead of the unending stream of network device OS vulnerability alerts can be a full-time job – but it does not have to be. Forward Enterprise now uses the latest information from the NIST National Vulnerability Database, along with specific device and configuration data collected from your network, to automatically recognize and flag potential network OS vulnerabilities. Security teams can save time and stress with proactive vulnerabilities updates presented in an easily actionable format.

To see these security features in action, please request a demo.

On June 28, we announced new features within Forward Enterprise that help security engineers spend less time on reactive tasks so they can be more proactive. Why would a networking company expand into the security space?  Good question.  Let me share some of the reasoning that led to expanding deeper into this space, and why I am excited about it.

Reason 1: The overwhelming and urgent need. 

Last year, the SolarWinds hack shocked the world with both the vector and its breadth of reach across the world, reminding us all of the importance of security, especially within the network.  Since then we’ve continued to see additional examples such as the recent Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack.  These are both preventable and containable.

Reason 2: Demand from our customers.  

Deployments that were originally triggered by a need for network operator-oriented visibility and verification have also seen adoption and used by their peer security engineers to solve a range of daily work tasks.  These security engineers have been highly enthusiastic about the time savings they gain by getting instant answers to network questions with Forward Networks, without needing to talk to a long chain of humans and spending hours to days gathering such information in their old way of working.  Based on this success, they have been asking us for an expanded security capability set, with an ultimate goal of a single unified view and platform for both the network and security teams to collaborate around.

Reason 3: Unique capabilities from unique technology.  

What do we do?  Put simply, we use math to organize network information, in the form of a digital twin, and make that network information accessible to people and machines.  This approach requires analyzing every possible way a packet could flow through your network.  And yes, that is effectively a comprehensive pen test that runs on our customers’ global networks  10s of times per day!  That data enables network verification like that is nothing like the testing or mapping you’re used to.

Reason 4: Hack Week.  

In April, our engineering team had a week to work on anything.  What did they choose to do?  Security.  Working closely with customers and having an impact is why they are here.  Many of the projects created “easy buttons” for common (and highly complex) security tasks, and when shown to security teams, their feedback was clear: “I want this, yesterday.”

Those are all solid reasons, but I want to add my own take, from doing SecOps at a Stanford Lab, to setting up security infrastructure when founding this company, and now answering to a board about security.

A large fraction of security incidents can be both prevented, or at least tightly contained – but only if a strong network security and segmentation policy has been implemented.  An ever-growing list of vendors are scrambling to provide different components of a Zero Trust solution for your business, but even if you buy one (or more) of these solutions, how do you know if you’ve implemented them correctly?  In the financial world, we have auditors to confirm that we have correctly implemented the appropriate financial practices. The same mechanism is critical for network security, and this is what Forward Networks provides in the form of network and security visibility and verification.

I’m proud to announce our latest release, 21.5, which includes these new marquee security-focused features:

All of these new capabilities can be used on both your live network, as well as any historical snapshot you’ve taken in the past (for forensics), and all can be easily integrated via API into your automation framework of choice.

This is just the beginning of our security journey, and we’d like to bring our unique capabilities as a partner on your Zero Trust security journey.  If you’d like to learn more, please request a demo.

Did you hear about the change window that went exactly as planned? No? That’s because the odds of winning the PowerBall without buying a ticket are better than the odds of executing a change window on a global network without a glitch. 

What about the story of the tier one network engineer that diagnosed and resolved an ACL in seconds? That one also seems as mythical as staying friends with your ex—but it’s not. 

Instead of telling you the story, I want to show you how it’s done, which is why I recently hosted a workshop showcasing how we use search and intent verification within the Forward Networks Platform to tame ACLs (Access Control Lists). 

I’ve spent untold hours trying to troubleshoot an ACL issue after a change window and that was on a network I’d been running for decades, for tier-one admin, or even a more advanced engineer working on a new (or newly blended) network, it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack while wearing a blindfold and being chased by rabid badgers.

On the face of it, the process for resolving ACL issues is pretty straightforward:

  1. Determine where your ACLs are running (which interfaces)
  2. Locate the ACL creating the issue
  3. Analyze the ACL to find the problem and resolve the issue

Except—networks have evolved over decades and include tens of thousands of devices from dozens of vendors and cloud providers running billions of lines of config. The fact is network complexity is outpacing IT support capabilities. Today, nothing about running a global network is straightforward without a comprehensive understanding of the network’s behavior and detailed visualization of traffic paths. 

Managing ACLs  shouldn’t be that hard

At Forward Networks, we think that the hard stuff should be easy, so we’ve done something unique. We developed a mathematical model that creates a network digital twin with Google-like search capabilities. By collecting and analyzing device state and packet forwarding data over time, we provide more than network visualization – we put the humans back in control of the network by providing them synthesized, actionable insights around network behavior. 

The Morning After the Change Window Before

The call comes in—a user can’t access an application – or worse, unauthorized users are accessing a secure app. What to do?  The network team always gets the call first, but the firewall tribe and security squad were also making changes – so how do you know which change created the problem?

The Forward Networks Platform (which functions as SaaS or be loaded onto an on-site VM) collects snapshots of the network over time including state data (ARP tables, route tables, interface tables, and so on) to develop a behavioral model of the network, providing detailed information on how packets are forwarded, filtered, and mutated. The end result is not only detailed visualization of the network but also advanced behavior modeling. For the ACL workshop, I focused on two ways to solve the issue, search and intent verification.

Search Two Ways: Text and Behavioral Path

Wouldn’t it be great if your network was indexed the same way the Internet is, and you could search it as easily as using Google? Ima ‘bout to rock your world by doing it right in front of your eyes.

Maybe you only know the IP address of a device that’s misbehaving. Our text search bar lets you enter that IP address (or any other atomic network information) and instantly gives you everything you need to know about that device (including which ACL rules/policies are applied to it). Maybe you want to search by ACL names—you can do that as well, and the platform returns config information with the ACL-related lines highlighted. This is ridiculously helpful when firewall configs have tens of thousands of lines. Now, even Tier-one support engineers can diagnose the problem and route it to the correct team with the context they need to immediately resolve the issue—no more searching manuals or paging through thousands of lines of config. 

By conducting a behavioral path search from the Internet to a specific application, you can see the exact path(s) traffic takes to the application in blue.  The gray lines denote detailed information about what happens to the packets as they flow through the network and the functions that are applied to them which is explained in the path’s pane. The platform serves up the relevant information without the network admin having to know details about the firewall or its syntax. The search shown above tells us that there is a path, and helps us easily identify that there are issues are with the firewall config, saving tons of time (conversely, it would tell us if the network path is broken). 

Behavioral searches can be saved as expected behaviors (intents) so that anytime the platform gathers information about the network, it will confirm that path is working as expected. In the workshop, I show how this function also can be used to verify if the “fix” applied by our friends in the tribe of firewall worked as expected (spoiler—it didn’t but network operations saves the day) without any risk to the production network, by using the predictive capabilities of the platform within the network digital twin. 

NQE – Your ACL management BFF 

In-App NQE (Network Query Engine), checks the data collected from the network and looks for states in the network that should (or should not) exist. For instance, an NQE Check can look for ACLs that are defined on a device but not applied to an interface. Custom checks can be written from inside the browser using syntax within the browser. There’s nothing to download; all of the reference information such as the data model and documentation is available within the browser window. This is a much better way to roll than my days of custom coding queries trying to pull information from the dozens of tabs I’ve opened to write code in the past. 

Sound interesting?  Watch the full ACL workshop (30 minutes of live-demo content). We host Forward Fix Live every month – On April 21, 2020 we’re going to dive deeper into one of our most popular features—NQE. There are two sessions, so no matter what time zone you are in! one for the East Coast and one

April 21, 2021 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time

April 21, 2021 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time

Only have a few minutes but you want to see more content by engineers for engineers?  Check out our YouTube playlist Forward Fixes – no hype, just actionable information, in roughly five-minute chunks. 

In network operations, it’s never the same day twice.

Most network engineers love this aspect, but it has a dark side. The best plans often fall to the wayside—in an instant work stops and firefighting begins.

In the last year, I’ve been part of a whole-day colo move, diagnosed an outage in the middle of the night, and resolved a slow performance issue. I know what the networking operations experience is like, and I know how much better it can be. 

Enabling others to solve every network problem at “global enterprise-scale”—faster and with more confidence is… let’s just say, very motivating. Especially when the networks are composed of multiple clouds, tens of thousands of devices, and are managed by multiple operations teams. I think about it like this:

If network behavior and insights were instantly available, you could speed up pretty much every network operations or engineering task.

In over seven years, I haven’t come across anyone who disagrees!  Everyone who has personally felt the stress of an outage, wasted a week tracking down a problem that ultimately was outside the network, or even spent too long with a simple ticket, doesn’t just agree—they feel it.

People in network operations and engineering wonder—is this even possible. The first questions are always of the “does it really work,” “how long will it take to set up,” “how much risk does it add,” and “can my team use it” variety. Not only do I hear these questions—I ask them of my vendors. Yes, it’s possible; we’ve been doing it at full scale for lots of companies you know, including Goldman Sachs for years.

Network operators and engineers don’t just need to see it to believe it. They need to deploy it, use it, and then have their coworkers use it, to believe it. 

The first step is seeing it. We joined Networking Field Day 24 to show what a day in a network operations professional’s life using the Forward Enterprise Platform looks like, from unboxing to integrations—covering killer use cases between. Instead of death-by-PPT, our field engineers, the technical experts who work side-by-side with our users to deploy Forward Enterprise, gave live demos and took questions. To make it easy for you to find content that’s relevant, we chunked it into short segments.

If the potential of instant network insight excites you—and you think maybe, just maybe—more time in the day could enable your team to be more proactive—then I’d like you to pick one thing you’ve recently had to spend time on, and check out the corresponding video below.

With the hands of our field team driving this, you’ll see what it’s like with the Forward Enterprise Platform. And if that passes your sniff test, as it’s done for many Fortune 500 enterprises already—reach out and schedule a personal demo. We’ll answer your toughest questions. We want to!

In fact, I dare you to pick one task from the list below that you or your team have done recently, and show me why instant access to info and insights WOULD NOT transform the speed of that task, and get your team on a path to faster, more proactive operations. 

Here’s what we covered, over a complete “day in the life”:

Unboxing to Up-to-Date, Searchable Network Model—15 minutes to Insight

Knowing the network topology’s detailed state is the first step in ensuring that your network is agile, predictable, and secure. Watch our Technical Solutions Architecture team leader, Elyor Khakimov, create a usable map and comprehensive collection of network data in less than 15 minutes without disrupting the network.

Path Analysis—Using Automation to Combat Complexity

After spending 20 years in the field helping network operations teams resolve issues, Technical Solution Architect Glen Turner knows that immediate access to actionable network behavior information is key to solving complex problems quickly. In this live demo, watch Glen use the search functionality within the Forward Networks Platform to analyze paths and reduce time spent troubleshooting to the seconds it takes him to type in a query into a search bar. 

Security Breach—Going back in time to resolve a leak

Need to find and resolve a data-leak issue but don’t have hours to do it? Armed with only four MAC address characters and the Forward Enterprise search bar, Senior Technical Solution Architect Scot Wilson shows how he’s used the Forward Networks platform to do it in four steps and under 10 minutes.

Audit—Search Billions of Lines of Config in Seconds

A simple typo caused a major network outage. The Forward Networks Network Query Engine (NQE) ‘s Google-like search capabilities helped resolve the issue in seconds – not hours. Customer Success Manager Jack Shen demonstrates how he did it and how NQE makes audits faster and more accurate.

Workflow Integrations—Solve Problems Faster by Getting the Right Data to the Right People

Without context, even the best applications only partially streamline ticket resolution. Senior Technical Solutions Architect Kevin Kuhls takes you through a live demonstration of our ServiceNow and Splunk integrations to show how quickly incidents can be resolved when context is automatically shared. 

Do you want to see more content by engineers for engineers and have only 5 minutes?  Check out our YouTube playlist Forward Fixes – no hype, just actionable information, in roughly five-minute chunks.

Still skeptical? I get it, and I challenge you to put us to the test, request a demo and give us your toughest challenges.

Network security is a top-of-mind concern for business executives and technical leaders alike. The costs of a major breach can range in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and it can take years for companies’ reputations to recover. But when most people think about network security, network modeling, visualization, and path analysis probably don’t spring to mind. 

We believe it should. Our platform is engineered to provide security teams detailed access to actionable L2 – L4 data they can use to enhance their network security posture.

Apparently, we aren’t the only ones who think so! Recently 45 expert judges worldwide named Forward Networks the Gold winner for the 2021 Globee Cybersecurity Global Excellence Awards in the network security and management category. 

Global multi-vendor, multi-cloud networks are increasingly complex and difficult to secure. At the same time, bad actors are notoriously persistent and creative in finding ways to breach the network. If you can’t see actual traffic paths to and from hosts, trying to find the cause or scope of a breach from a compromised device is a time-consuming, tedious, and labor-intensive endeavor. And while there is never a good time for slow issue resolution—speed during a security incident is imperative because the stakes are higher than a network outage. Both network operations and security teams need the right tools to succeed.

The Forward Networks platform creates a mathematical model of the network, across thousands of devices across, enabling immediate, accurate, network verification and visualization, through path analysis, behavior diffs, and intent checks

For the first time, commercially available software empowers network operations and security teams with detailed path analysis. Using the Forward Networks platform, technical teams have access to automatically visualized documentation indicating which devices can communicate to and from hosts on the network, and on which ports. Information that’s essential for post-event forensic work, determining if security policies are behaving as expected, and implementing preventative security measures.

The Forward Networks platform’s intuitive interface (or robust RESTful APIs) and Google-like search capabilities lets security teams ask questions and immediately get detailed, actionable information they can use to protect the network.

Want to see it in action? check out our security breach demonstration from Networking Field Day 24 – with only four characters of a MAC address, our technical solutions expert uses the Forward Networks platform to trace down the cause of a data leak by going “back in time.” Additionally, you can visit our security solution page: http://www.forwardnetworks/security/

As more enterprise-class cloud platforms have emerged over the last few years, organizations are looking to leverage these alternatives to take best advantage of each in a multi-cloud IT strategy. The advantages of a multi-cloud strategy can easily include resiliency, price-competitiveness, feature-alignment, and cross-silo visibility. 

But with all these advantages comes the complexity of dealing with inconsistencies between cloud providers, both from a policy compliance perspective, as well as a consolidated management view. To be successful, organizations need a common verification platform to ensure easy transition and flexibility between multi-cloud providers. 

SDxCentral outlined some of the key benefits of a multi-cloud strategy in this article:

Enterprises select a multi-cloud strategy due to the benefits. For starters, the multi-cloud is readily available. If one cloud is offline, then the enterprise may still work on the other clouds and achieve its goals. It’s also customizable and flexible in the sense that an enterprise may “select the ‘best’ of each cloud type to suit their particular business needs, economics, locations, and timing.”  Another significant draw for a multi-cloud adoption is that enterprises can escape vendor lock-in as its data is stored on various service providers’ clouds.

The multi-cloud strategy offers security precautions that a single cloud deployment does not. According to Citrix, the multi-cloud also hinders Shadow IT activity. The company describes Shadow IT as “technology used by individuals or groups within an organization that is not managed by the organization’s IT department. This problem tends to arise when policy-compliant IT does not fully meet the needs of the organization. A multi-cloud environment allows groups to comply with IT policy while benefiting from a specific cloud technology.” It also dodges the gravity of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack as the attack won’t affect all the clouds within a multi-cloud, leaving the enterprise still functional despite the attack.

But what are the differences and complexity between this and a traditional hybrid cloud strategy? In a hybrid cloud strategy, which includes a single primary cloud provider and the on-premises private cloud, there is no need to worry about inconsistencies between cloud infrastructures. If, for example, application deployments should be consistent from a myriad of policy requirements between two or more cloud providers, that has been a lot of work to ensure just from a security and application connectivity perspective. 

Similarly, should a multi-cloud strategy imply that traffic flows are not going between cloud providers and that each cloud provider is just a siloed hybrid cloud deployment? Hopefully, not, but how can network administrators visualize and manage network paths and topologies across multiple cloud vendors? Are destinations in each cloud provider reachable with the right application policies, with the optimal traffic patterns, across multiple providers and the on-premises hybrid cloud network? Who is providing this management view, tools, and verification checks?

Hybrid cloud platforms and management tools often have a difficult time showing end-to-end traffic flows and topologies across a single cloud provider and the on-premises network. But this is exactly what makes Forward Networks an ideal platform to ease the migration from a hybrid cloud approach to a multi-cloud strategy.

Within our multi-vendor, cloud-agnostic verification platform, we eliminate the seams between cloud vendors and the private cloud network. Not only can the entire topology of a multi-cloud environment be visualized in a single view, but we can ensure that implementations for various policy requirements are consistent between cloud providers. Organizations can eliminate most of the complexity and differences between various cloud platforms, or at least easily verify the impact of deployments as they are migrated from one provider to another. 

Distributing workloads to where they make the most sense financially and technically can finally be managed with greater flexibility and confidence. If an organization has experts on managing only a single hybrid cloud infrastructure, now everyone can take advantage of a common view and automated verification checks to quickly assess network-wide, multi-cloud policies, identify configuration errors between cloud platforms and quickly add more value to the organization. 

Today, Forward Networks supports AWS VPC cloud services, along with Microsoft Azure, and (coming soon) Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Building a multi-cloud environment between and across these vendors has never been easier or cost-effective, as you look to avoid cloud-provider lock-in. 

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