By Misha Cetrone, Vice President

Customers can now streamline the purchase and management of AWS Direct Connect and private connectivity from within AWS Marketplace.

When I speak with enterprise customers about their cloud roadmap, they typically share the same vision: A true high-performance multicloud environment utilizing best-of-breed services from each cloud provider, with seamlessly tied-together cross-cloud data flows, all supporting high performance applications – and, of course, the end user experience that people have not only come to expect, but demand.

But more often than not, this vision is impeded by reality. Despite using best-of-breed services, application performance in a distributed, multi-vendor environment is only as good as the underlying connectivity.

Multicloud connectivity can be challenging, and despite the network being exceedingly important to the end-user experience, it is often under-prioritized. Companies that use internet VPNs quickly run themselves into an unreliable mess of tunnels between environments, causing run-on impacts on performance, network management, and troubleshooting.

Companies that attempt a move to private connectivity with traditional networking options find that static connections, with term commitments , are too inflexible in a constantly evolving multicloud environment.

Most often, this leads to over-provisioning and unnecessary spend on connections that either don’t get enough use, or none at all in the event of a cloud strategy shift.

Multicloud networking with Megaport

Megaport’s solutions are a direct response to the clear need for an easier, more flexible cloud connectivity solution. When used with AWS, they enrich your network with new features and capabilities.

• Cross-Cloud: Spin up a virtual router to handle traffic between AWS and public and private clouds at the network edge. No physical presence is required, so you can begin data transfer between cloud environments without delay.
• Hybrid Cloud: Connect private infrastructure to AWS and any other service providers across our network.
• Virtual Connectivity Hub: On-demand Network Function Virtualization (NFV). Deploy SD-WAN gateways to enable branch locations with private access to AWS via Direct Connect, virtual routers for private multicloud networking, and virtual firewalls for simplified security in just minutes, with no physical presence required in the data center. Bring control to remote endpoints, Megaport Internet, your AWS environment, and other cloud providers.

Each connection to and between cloud services over Megaport’s private network uses AWS Direct Connect solutions and similar offerings from other cloud service providers. AWS Direct Connect is a networking service that provides an alternative to using the internet to connect to AWS.

Using AWS Direct Connect, data that would have previously been transported to or from the cloud over the internet is delivered through a private network connection. Utilizing private connectivity offerings improves performance and can reduce cost, especially in multicloud environments where data migrations or steady-state, cross-cloud data flows are common.

High-performance multicloud networking on AWS Marketplace

I’m excited to share that Megaport is the first AWS Direct Connect network service offering on AWS Marketplace. This makes it even easier for AWS customers to implement our cloud connectivity solutions and remove transaction friction, streamline procurement, and consolidate billing.

You can create your custom network designs in consultation with our solutions team and consume it as a private offer directly from AWS Marketplace. As a leading AWS Direct Connect Delivery and Outpost Service Ready partner, our solutions team has specialized expertise to solve complex hybrid and multicloud connectivity challenges.

On deployment you’ll gain access to the entire Megaport platform, which is designed to simplify complex connectivity challenges with built-in automation. It’s global, scalable, secure, and simple.

• Global and Scalable: Connect to all the major hyperscalers, over 100+ data center operators, and 360+ service providers across the globe. You pay only for the capacity you deploy. Since you can scale that capacity up and down on demand, you no longer have to worry about traffic spikes or wasted capacity.
• Secure: Your data travels on our private global network, bypassing the public internet. Predictable performance, like having your own private fiber lines.
• Simple: Design, deploy, and manage it all on a single portal. It’s point-and-click. You bring your cloud service keys, and our integrations will make establishing private connectivity painless.

How AWS customers benefit from Megaport

Enterprises connecting to AWS via Direct Connect use Megaport to deploy a tailored network solution for their unique environment. Here are some ways in which Megaport delivers positive outcomes for AWS customers.

Animation Research:

• Halved provisioning time to improve live sports broadcast latency.
• Simplified connectivity processes and gained more granular control with the Megaport portal.
• Significantly reduced costs for constantly changing network requirements by moving from a static contract model to Megaport’s pay-as-you-go model. Reduced carbon footprint by 85 percent by drastically cutting travel to live events and reducing on-site event crew sizes thanks to Megaport’s Software Defined Network (SDN).

Florida Cancer Specialists:

• Created a hybrid cloud solution by connecting to AWS, via Megaport, from their Cyxtera data center.
• Enabled easy transportation of mission-critical data workloads such as medical history records, X-ray scans, and general patient information out of AWS and back to their colocation environment.
• Reduced traffic latency and right-sized their bandwidth to provide efficient and optimized data flow for the ability to access patient records in real time.
• Built secure and private data connections between their hybrid cloud environments to account for sensitive data.

NXP:

• Spun up and connected a new cloud environment to support NXP’s North American region in only a week – reducing launch timeline by nearly 6 months.
• Lowered latency by reducing the amount of inter-cloud traffic hairpinning to NXP’s on-premises data centers.
• Enabled greater network agility with dynamic scaling of bandwidth and deployment of virtual routers and connections that allow for quick setup and teardowns of testing environments.
• Enabled a Cloud Center of Excellence supporting 9,000+ global engineers with private connectivity to support high-availability.

Get started today

Contact us to begin designing a more streamlined, secure, and performant network with Megaport and AWS today.