Site2Cloud Case Study

Traditionally enterprises host their IT applications in their own data center or at a co-location. Remote sites typically connect to the data center via an Internet-based IPsec VPN tunnel or MPLS based private network. Such a hub and spoke architecture has been prevalent in the last 15 years.

A problem with this deployment architecture is long latency or unstable Internet connectivity suffered by remote sites, especially between those in different continents. Such problems cause application time out, resulting in lost productivity and an unhappy user experience. The solution to this pain point has been to deploy some form of WAN optimization in both the remote sites and data center to reduce application latency and reduce data bandwidth. These gears are complex, expensive and not every enterprise can afford them, and in some cases, they don’t always work well.

With the many regions in the world available brought by public cloud providers, such as AWS and Azure, the application latency issue can now be solved in a brand-new way. By placing applications in a region of public cloud that your remote sites are closer to than to the data center, the long latency issue is eliminated altogether. In addition, by moving servers to the cloud, you can reduce remote sites' footprint and the amount of hardware to manage, thus reducing cost for ongoing maintenance.

The comparison between the two deployment architectures is described below:

In the diagram above, remote sites or branch offices connect to the headquarters' data center via IPsec tunnels. International sites across continents can experience hundreds or more milliseconds in latency and in some countries, connectivity to headquarters is unstable at times.

The first step in deploying an application close to the user is to build a new network architecture as shown in the right side of the diagram above. A remote site now connects via an IPsec tunnel to the closest Aviatrix Gateway in a VPC or VNet in a region closest to the site. Different remote sites may connect to different Aviatrix Gateways. For example, sites in China connect to Aviatrix Gateways in the Azure China region and sites in Europe connect to an Aviatrix Gateway in a VPC in the AWS eu-west-1 region.

After the new network is deployed, you can now replicate Active Directory to VPC/VNet and deploy applications such as ERP in the cloud too. The AD authentication latency and application latency can be reduced to tens of milliseconds. In addition, the remotes are simpler with fewer hardware equipment to manage.

For how to set up Site2Cloud, see Deploy: Site2Cloud.