Why Short-Term Network Connectivity Is Such A Great Fit For Temporary Workloads

Modern enterprise networking needs to be extremely flexible.

Not only does the network need to meet the different connectivity requirements of different enterprise sites at different times, but it also needs to support the bandwidth demands of various applications being accessed on the network. 

There are some networking scenarios, however, when extreme flexibility is not enough - and instead a more temporary solution is required.

This is certainly the case for enterprises looking for high capacity connections to a data centre in order to access a SaaS provider to run certain accounts or functions. Typically these functions may take only a number of weeks and creating the connection over a static enterprise WAN could be difficult, particularly if the enterprise doesn’t already have a presence in the required data centre.

That is when an enterprise may want to consider a form of short-term connectivity that supports that temporary workload over a finite number of days or week. Ideally, that connection would be a seamless extension of the enterprise’s existing MPLS network and when no longer required, their network engineers could simply scale the service back down or even disconnect it completely.

Using the power of Software Defined Interconnection®, Console Connect enables an enterprise to create this form of short-term connectivity on an MPLS network. This means the enterprise gets the vast majority of advantages of a dedicated MPLS network, but with more agile capabilities.

Short-term connectivity in action

Let’s look at an example of that short-term connectivity in action. A digital media company that creates its own video content needs to connect its office in London, where it creates the raw footage, to a server farm in a data centre in the US.

It has a very large volume of data to shift, so using Console Connect, the company can spin-up a 1Gbps connection for a few weeks to transfer all the data from London to the US.

That connection can then be scaled back down for a few weeks while the videos are rendered at the US server farm.

When the videos are finished, the company can scale the bandwidth back-up to transfer the data back and then dial it down once again to something more appropriate for the day-to-day.

An extension of the WAN

So how is Console Connect able to achieve this form of short-term connectivity?

Using PCCW Global’s own MPLS network, Console Connect applies a layer of abstraction to set-up and tear down dedicated connections on that network using SDN.

This means Console Connect can take a lot of the problems away from connecting data centre to data centre and allows an enterprise to scale up bandwidth between data centres in near real-time.

With a dedicated link set-up over Console Connect, a public cloud instance can effectively appear as an additional site on an enterprise’s IP VPN, extending private connectivity all the way to the cloud service.

As a result, an enterprise’s public cloud asset essentially becomes an extension of its WAN and data centre. The dedicated MPLS connection ensures that no data to or from the public cloud passes over the public internet.

This also means an enterprise can benefit from consistent throughput and latency, making Console Connect an excellent option for rapid data backup and recovery.