Cloud Connectivity and Amazon Direct Connect

Editor's Notes

• #3: Grange City Hotel – a customer of Exponential-eWhite paperAmazon Relationship
• #39: This forecast is part of the Cisco® Visual Networking Index (VNI), an ongoing initiative to track and forecast the impact of visual networking applicationsSummary Annual global IP traffic will surpass the zettabyte threshold (1.3 zettabytes) by the end of 2016. In 2016, global IP traffic will reach 1.3 zettabytes per year or 109.5 exabytes per month.Global IP traffic has increased eightfold over the past 5 years, and will increase threefold over the next 5 years. Overall, IP traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29 percent from 2011 to 2016.In 2016, the gigabyte equivalent of all movies ever made will cross global IP networks every 3 minutes. Global IP networks will deliver 12.5 petabytes every 5 minutes in 2016.Traffic from wireless devices will exceed traffic from wired devices by 2016. In 2016, wired devices will account for 39 percent of IP traffic, while Wi-Fi and mobile devices will account for 61 percent of IP traffic. In 2011, wired devices accounted for the majority of IP traffic at 55 percent.Business:Business Internet traffic will grow at a faster pace than IP WAN. IP WAN will grow at a CAGR of 18 percent, compared to a CAGR of 23 percent for fixed business Internet and 66 percent for mobile business Internet.Business IP traffic will grow fastest in the Middle East and Africa. Business IP traffic in the Middle East and Africa will grow at a CAGR of 33 percent,Business videoconferencing will grow sixfold over the forecast period. Business videoconferencing traffic is growing significantly faster than overall business IP traffic, at a CAGR of 48 percent between 2011 and 2016.Web-based videoconferencing will reach 56.3 percent of total business videoconferencing traffic in 2011Mobile:Global mobile data traffic will grow three times faster than fixed IP traffic from 2011 to 2016. Global mobile data traffic was 2 percent of total IP traffic in 2011, and will be 10 percent of total IP traffic in 2016.Video:Internet video to TV doubled in 2011. Internet video to TV will continue to grow at a rapid pace, increasing sixfold by 2016. Internet video to TV traffic will be 11 percent of consumer Internet video traffic in 2016, up from 8 percent in 2011.It would take over 6 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks each month in 2016. Every second, 1.2 million minutes of video content will cross the network in 2016.Video-on-demand traffic will triple by 2016. The amount of VoD traffic in 2016 will be equivalent to 4 billion DVDs per month
• #40: While security remains the primary barrier to adoption for cloud, having a direct, private connection also deals with the performance issues which can be experienced by organisations accessing services over the internet. While organisations have extremely high-levels of control over performance on their LAN, the story is completely different when the internet becomes part of the equation. Your connection in this use-case is only as fast as the slowest part of the public internet, which means that as soon as the internet becomes at all congested, performance-levels experienced by end-users will suffer.
• #42: Reduces Your Bandwidth Costs – If you have bandwidth-heavy workloads that you wish to run in AWS, AWS Direct Connect reduces your network costs into and out of AWS in two ways. First, by transferring data to and from AWS directly, you can reduce your bandwidth commitment to your Internet service provider. Second, all data transferred over your dedicated connection is charged at the reduced AWS Direct Connect data transfer rate rather than Internet data transfer rates.Consistent Network Performance – Network latency over the Internet can vary given that the Internet is constantly changing how data gets from point A to B. With AWS Direct Connect, you choose the data that utilizes the dedicated connection and how that data is routed which can provide a more consistent network experience over Internet-based connections.Compatible with all AWS Services – AWS Direct Connect is a network service, and works with all AWS services that are accessible over the Internet, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).Private Connectivity to your Amazon VPC – You can use AWS Direct Connect to establish a private logical connection from your on-premise network directly to your Amazon VPC, providing you with a private, high bandwidth network connection between your network and your VPC. With multiple logical connections, you can even establish private connectivity to multiple VPCs while maintaining network isolation.Elastic – AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to scale your connection to meet your needs. AWS Direct Connect provides 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps connections, and you can easily provision multiple connections if you need more capacity. You can also use AWS Direct Connect instead of establishing a VPN connection over the Internet to your Amazon VPC, avoiding the need to utilize VPN hardware that frequently can’t support data transfer rates above 4 Gbps.
• #44: DR and DB and fast storage
• #48: The analogy we use to describe the benefits of direct, private cloud connections is to picture the route to the cloud as a motorway. In the same way that other drivers are a threat to our safety and slow our progress, the public internet is like a congested motorway - getting from A to B quickly and safely is dependent on traffic which is a factor outside of anyone’s control. A private cloud connection is like driving on your own dedicated road to which no one else has access. Without other traffic you’re safe from other drivers and will undoubtedly arrive at your destination faster.Large banks, for example, handling thousands of customer records, simply cannot afford to be processing or accessing that data in ‘public-view’. For these types of organisation, private cloud connections will surely be the only palatable type of connection.