Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched the general availability of AWS Cloud WAN, a new managed wide area network (WAN) service designed to connect on-premises data centers, co-location facilities, branch offices and cloud resources to global network operations.
According to Amazon, the service includes a built-in central management dashboard that customers can use to define their network configuration, view the health of their global network and automate routine configuration and security tasks. The company first announced the public preview of the service late last year.
The company says this new solution helps organizations connect their disparate locations and environments, including between on-premises data centers and branch offices. Historically, doing so required building their own physical network or a software-defined overlay network from third-party providers, leading to a complex web of networks with different connectivity, security, monitoring and performance management tools and requirements.
AWS Cloud WAN is designed to make it more efficient for customers to build, manage and monitor a unified global network, in addition to connecting their cloud and on-premises environments. Customers can use the centralized management dashboard to connect on-premises data centers, co-location facilities, branch offices, and AWS Regions into a single, unified global network, the company says.
IT teams can use the solution to apply policies and automate configuration and security tasks across their entire network, including the ability to apply a policy that requires network traffic from branch offices to be routed through a specific network firewall before reaching cloud resources running in an AWS region.
AWS Cloud WAN also integrates with SD-WAN, network appliance and software vendors, including Aruba, Aviatrix, Checkpoint, Cisco Meraki, Cisco Systems, Prosimo and VMware.
In a statement, David Brown, vice president of Amazon EC2 at AWS, said many wide-area networks are made up of a “patchwork of connections” between branch offices and data centers designed for on-premises apps.
“As the edge of the cloud continues to be pushed outward, and more customers move their applications to AWS to become more agile, reduce complexity, and save money, they need an easier way to evolve their networks to support a modern, distributed model that allows them to reach their customers and end users globally with high performance,” Brown said. “With AWS Cloud WAN, enterprises can simplify their operations and leave the time-consuming task of managing complex webs of networks behind.”
Read Amazon’s blog for more information on how to get started with AWS Cloud Wan.
In addition, AWS also announced the general availability of three new serverless analytics offerings for Amazon EMR, Amazon MSK, and Amazon Redshift that respectively allow organizations to run analytics applications using open-source big data framework without having to manage the infrastructure, to simplify real-time data ingestion and streaming and to run high-performance data warehousing and analytics workloads on petabytes of data without having to manage clusters.
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