If your enterprise is like most of Forward Networks’ customers, then your IT shop oversees a sizable cloud estate. You probably have hundreds of accounts, projects, or subscriptions across different cloud vendors. There are tons of related objects too — virtual machines, firewalls, transit gateways, subnets, and more. And cloud-native apps? Maybe you have hundreds of those in use or development as well.

Your IT team needs to manage this complex environment efficiently and effectively. Yet, it’s unlikely they know exactly what that environment looks like and how everything in it relates to and interacts with each other. No doubt, they’re also unsure whether the company’s networking and security policies have been properly extended to the cloud. Meanwhile, your cloud estate keeps growing and changing all the time.

Given how critical cloud platforms and applications are to supporting your business, your IT team really can’t go on without access to granular, real-time, and historical insight into what’s happening in your cloud environment. They don’t have that insight for a host of reasons, from the lack of appropriate tools to insufficient knowledge about specific platforms. But they can get that insight with the Forward Enterprise platform from Forward Networks, which presents the single source of truth about your cloud infrastructure in a single pane of glass.

In Forward Enterprise, your IT team gets a comprehensive and always up-to-date view of your cloud estate from a global level down to a specific instance. The platform provides the most complete and in-depth path analysis, custom verification, and visualization capabilities for on-premises environments and multi-cloud estates that span across multiple vendors such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. And if your IT team wants to explore a specific aspect of the cloud infrastructure, they can drill down on the details with a single click.

Your organization’s multi-cloud environment is a big investment for your business, and it’s a marvel to behold. With the Forward Enterprise platform, you can take it all in — every object and traffic pattern — through a single pane of glass and make sure everything is operating just as it should be. To learn more about this eye-opening capability from Forward Networks, read this use case.

Register for our upcoming Forward Fix Live [webinar] to learn how Forward Enterprise can prevent costly intercloud routing mistakes.

Forward Enterprise Makes the Cloud More Agile, Predictable, and Secure

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 23, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Forward Networks, the only company offering visibility and intent capabilities across the entire network estate, including on-premises, hybrid-cloud, private cloud, public cloud, and multi-cloud instances, today announced enhancements to the Forward Enterprise platform. Forward Enterprise now provides unprecedented visibility into network configuration and behavior in an actionable, vendor-agnostic format, enabling all organizations to conduct business in the cloud with certainty. In addition, the new cloud capabilities give IT teams a 360-degree view of both physical and virtual environments, as well as a single pane of glass for end-to-end in-depth connectivity analysis and policy and security verification.

Forward Enterprise creates a digital twin of an enterprise environment across on-premises devices, as well as hybrid multi-cloud environments. IT teams can instantly troubleshoot, verify intent, and predict network behavior by computing all possible traffic paths. The new platform enhancements also ensure security policies are enforced and prevent costly multi-cloud routing mistakes.

"For enterprises running large and complex networks, the cloud promised agility, economics, and security, but it has delivered complexity, expense, and risk," said David Erickson, Co-Founder and CEO, Forward Networks. "Our new platform enhancements were developed after listening to our customers detail their pain points and will help enterprises take the next right step in their cloud journey. They now have the same visibility and transparency into multi-cloud network traffic as on-prem environments and can be confident that they have the necessary information to make networks more reliable and secure."

CLOUD WITH CONFIDENCE
Unlike the proprietary tools cloud providers offer subscribers, Forward Enterprise provides visibility, insight, and troubleshooting capabilities across multiple clouds. Using this insight, professionals can often remediate potential problems before they materialize, saving time and money. Forward Enterprise is the only platform on the market capable of building a software model of all major networking vendors and services at scale, including for hybrid multi-cloud environments. It also offers complete integration with the top cloud platforms, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). In addition, the platform computes all possible traffic paths for unparalleled insight into network behavior, including how some changes can impact network behavior and compliance verification.

• Single source of truth (and pane of glass). Forward Enterprise allows Networking, Security, and Cloud professionals to look at the same data when troubleshooting or verifying network behaviors. The single pane of glass model delivers actionable information in an intuitive, vendor-agnostic manner.
• Verify cloud security posture complies with corporate policy. IT Professionals now have unprecedented access to relevant infrastructure data to prevent incidents. Using the same award-winning custom verification capabilities that Forward Enterprise delivers on-prem, IT professionals can be alerted any time a cloud configuration is outside of the network compliance policy. Timely alerts enable teams to quickly remediate the situation before there's an incident.
• Secure application provisioning in the cloud. Using custom verification and intent checks, developers and cloud operators can instantly ensure that new applications' paths adhere to corporate governance policies. Eliminating manual policy checks streamlines the process and positions companies to recognize revenue on new offerings faster.
• Hop by Hop visibility. Traditionally, traffic flows moving from the on-premise environment to cloud, within the cloud, and between clouds are extremely difficult to analyze and verify. Through its mathematical modeling capabilities, the Forward Enterprise platform computes all possible traffic flows and provides detailed insight into how on-premises devices and cloud elements transform and direct traffic..
• End expensive multi-cloud routing mistakes. Custom verification checks alert engineering immediately when a non-compliant multi-cloud traffic pattern is deployed. This allows enterprises to remediate the errant routing and prevents associated billing surprises.

The new capabilities are generally available today, and pricing is based on pay-as-you-grow cloud consumption that does not require a large upfront investment.

About Forward Networks
Forward Networks is revolutionizing the way large networks are managed. Forward's advanced software delivers a "digital twin" of the network, enabling network operators to verify intent, predict network behavior, and simplify network management. The platform supports devices from all major networking vendors and cloud operators, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

Forward Networks was founded in 2013 by four Stanford Ph.D. graduates and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Investors include Goldman Sachs, Andreessen Horowitz, Threshold Ventures, and A. Capital.