What is Cloud Connect: A beginner's guide to connecting

Cloud Connect offers a secure, reliable, dedicated connection between your organisation’s IT infrastructure and the cloud computing services it uses. It provides simple, seamless access to the cloud.

If your organisation uses cloud applications, Cloud Connect is a technology you should seriously consider. To help you with that, here we explain what Cloud Connect is, how it works, and the benefits it could offer you.

What is Cloud Connect?

Cloud computing has fundamentally transformed business, with enterprises of all sizes, in all industries, embracing cloud services – whether that’s for storage, delivering software on demand, managing email, or facilitating remote working. Research suggests that as many as 94% of businesses with over 1,000 employees are now using cloud services.

But cloud computing can introduce its own challenges, including making sure all employees wherever they’re located have seamless, uninterrupted access to the cloud services they depend on. Delivering software-as-a-service can have considerable benefits, but if employees can’t access that software, or encounter lags and drops in service, those benefits will be squandered.

Cloud Connect addresses these risks by ensuring cloud services can be accessed reliably via a dedicated, private connection direct to the cloud that doesn’t use the public internet. In the past, commercial connections between business infrastructure and cloud services were all conducted across the public internet, but Cloud Connect is putting an end to that.

Cloud Connect links your organisation’s on-premises infrastructure or data centre directly to a cloud service provider's network, for example, Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure or Alibaba Cloud. This dedicated connection guarantees enhanced performance and greater reliability and security compared to using a traditional, public internet connection.

Cloud Connect is a dedicated, private link between your organisation’s IT infrastructure and a cloud provider’s network, ensuring you can access cloud services simply and reliably.

What is cloud connectivity?

Whereas Cloud Connect refers specifically to a dedicated, private connection between an organisation’s IT ecosystem and a cloud service, cloud connectivity is a broader term. It refers to any link between an organisation and a cloud provider, including forms of standard internet connection over the public internet.

What are the benefits of Cloud Connect?

By providing a direct, dedicated, secure link to your cloud service provider, Cloud Connect can provide: 

• Improved performance: A dedicated cloud connection can guarantee the performance of cloud-based applications by reducing latency and increasing bandwidth. This is particularly important for organisations that need to transfer large amounts of data or run applications requiring low latency, such as real-time analytics or video streaming.
• Increased reliability: A direct link offers a more reliable connection than public internet, ensuring your organisation can always access cloud services without drops or lags due to congestion or other network issues.
• Scalability: Cloud Connect solutions are designed to scale with an organisation's needs, providing the flexibility to adjust bandwidth to accommodate fluctuations in data transfer requirements.
• Security: Cloud Connect services typically provide enhanced security measures, such as dedicated network segments and encryption, on top of reducing the risks associated with transmitting sensitive data over public rather than private connections.
• Cost savings: Whilst using Cloud Connect services will incur a direct cost, that cost may be more than compensated for by preventing drops in service and reduced productivity that could incur higher costs to your organisation.
• Support for hybrid cloud solutions: Cloud Connect links are often used with hybrid cloud architectures, where organisations combine on-site infrastructure and cloud services. A dedicated connection facilitates seamless communication and reliable data transfer between these different environments.

Is Cloud Connect right for my business?

Whether or not Cloud Connect is the right choice for your business will depend upon a range of factors, including:

• How dependent you are on cloud services
• How damaging lag and the loss of cloud services could be
• Your requirements for scalability and security
• Cost considerations
• Whether or not you require the integration of multiple cloud services

One of the benefits of Cloud Connect is that if you decide it is the right investment to make, Cloud Connect services can be relatively easy to implement and simple to run, use and scale.

Find out more about Cloud Connect services with Console Connect

Our mission at Console Connect is to make it easy for you to connect your organisation’s digital ecosystem, and to do so securely and on your own terms.

Find out more about Console Connect and how our Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) platform makes it simple to interconnect your organisation’s clouds, applications and devices, including our cloud connect solutions.