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Alan Hannan is a member of the Netskope Network Visionaries advisory group.
The cloud often seems like a black box for many corporate networking and security professionals. They have expertise in optimizing their internal network. Still, once they offload their traffic to the cloud, they figure they’re handing off optimization to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider. But a company that chooses a business-critical cloud solution without considering the underlying architecture is setting itself up for potential disappointment down the road. Or even worse, opening themselves up to the risk of greater exposure to threats, lost or compromised data, or degraded employee productivity.
Offering an excellent customer experience in the cloud requires a multi-faceted and complex balancing act. SaaS providers must optimize many parameters, often weighing cost against various approaches to redundancy, scalability against resiliency, and security against performance. These are not simple equations where a change in one area has entirely predictable ramifications in the other. Vendors are constantly making decisions around tradeoffs to maximize customer satisfaction.
For companies using these vendors’ solutions—especially SaaS security solutions such as a secure access service edge (SASE) framework and security service edge (SSE) capabilities—understanding those tradeoffs is crucial to making the best decisions.
Keys to optimizing cloud traffic, ensuring performance across the internet
Optimizing internet traffic and computing resources have been critical themes of my career. In the mid-90s, when the Internet was nascent, and cloud computing wasn’t a thing, I ran peering at UUNET, one of the first and largest commercial internet service providers (ISPs). It was a lucky opportunity to learn a great deal about the inner workings of the early Internet. A lot of this work was around understanding how to create the most efficient routes. To do this, we’d not only get traffic from point A to B but also do it in the fastest, most cost-effective way.
With this knowledge, I moved on to management positions focused more exclusively on traffic engineering. As a vice president in operations engineering at various well-known Internet companies, including Global Crossing and Internap, I was responsible for deconstructing internet traffic and determining how to best move packets from one location to another; in other words, optimizing traffic across the Internet and for the new cloud paradigm. In different positions at Alcatel-Lucent, Aruba, and CrowdStrike, I operated distributed systems that used these cloud computing systems and their network and optimized our use of the systems and networks.
There are many facets to optimizing the performance of internet traffic. Two of the most important are #1 reducing the distance that data needs to travel–or the hops that potentially add latency and degrade performance, and #2 ensuring that all key networking components are provisioned appropriately. I joined the Netskope Network Visionaries advisory group because I’m impressed with how Netskope handles both of these crucial considerations in NewEdge.
Purpose-built architecture with compute at the edge, closer to the customer
To reduce the distance that data must travel from a customer location to the Netskope Security Cloud, the Netskope Platform Engineering team architected NewEdge to position traffic processing in nearly 60 data centers strategically positioned around the world. This approach places compute power as close to users as possible, and it is made possible because of the NewEdge approach. The distributed nature of compute resources for processing traffic is crucial for delivering a cloud security service. This distributed design is similar to CDNs but focuses on security enhancement. One of my counterparts in the Network Visionaries advisory group, Elaine Feeney, recently published a blog on this topic titled “Why the Edge Really Matters Right Now” that goes into the advantages of edge compute in greater detail.
Leveraging tradecraft from the most prominent cloud companies and hyperscalers, Netskope has intentionally built out NewEdge using what the company calls a “data center factory” approach, in which teams pre-build data center racks before shipping