What are the ways to connect an on-premise network to AWS Cloud?
Unlock the Secrets of Seamless On-Premise to AWS Cloud Connectivity: Discover the Top Methods! | Article
In today’s fast-paced business environment, organisations constantly seek ways to improve their IT infrastructure and increase efficiency. One solution that has gained significant popularity in recent years is the hybrid cloud model, which combines the benefits of both on-premise and cloud computing. Connecting to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud can benefit businesses looking to use this model. This blog post will explore how companies can connect to AWS and benefit from a hybrid cloud solution. From utilising AWS Direct Connect and VPN to leveraging hybrid cloud management tools, we will examine the various options available to help businesses seamlessly integrate their on-premise infrastructure with the AWS cloud. Whether you’re looking to improve scalability, reduce costs, or streamline your IT operations, a hybrid cloud solution can provide your business’s flexibility and reliability to succeed in today’s competitive market.
How do you connect to AWS?
Connecting services to the AWS cloud and working in a hybrid configuration can benefit organisations. By utilising the Cloud, businesses can take advantage of its scalability and pay-as-you-go pricing model, making it easier to manage their IT resources and reduce costs. In addition, in a hybrid configuration, businesses can maintain their existing on-premise infrastructure and leverage the Cloud for additional computing power and storage.
One popular method for connecting services to the AWS cloud is Direct Connect. This dedicated network connection provides a secure, high-speed link between your on-premises infrastructure and the AWS cloud. This improves network performance and reduces latency, making it ideal for data-intensive applications such as big data analytics.
Another option is VPN (Virtual Private Network) to establish a secure connection between your on-premises infrastructure and the AWS cloud. This allows you to access AWS resources as if they were part of your network, providing a simple and cost-effective solution for connecting your services.
In addition to these methods, hybrid cloud management tools, such as AWS CloudFormation and AWS Elastic Beanstalk, make managing and deploying resources across your hybrid infrastructure easier. These tools can help you automate deployment and scaling processes, making managing your resources easier and ensuring high availability.
Connecting services to the AWS cloud and working in a hybrid configuration can provide organisations the flexibility and scalability needed to meet their business’s demands. In addition, by leveraging the Cloud, organisations can reduce costs, improve performance, and increase efficiency, helping them stay ahead in today’s competitive market.
Here are some interesting facts and statistics about hybrid configuration using on-premise infrastructure and AWS cloud:
- Adoption rate: According to a recent survey, over 70% of businesses use or plan to use a hybrid cloud solution. This demonstrates the growing popularity of hybrid configurations to meet the demands of today’s fast-paced business environment.
- Cost savings: By utilising a hybrid cloud configuration, businesses can reduce their overall IT costs by leveraging the Cloud’s scalability and pay-as-you-go pricing model. A study by RightScale found that companies can save up to 30% on their IT costs by using a hybrid cloud solution.
- Improved security: Hybrid configurations provide a multi-layer approach to security, allowing businesses to maintain control over sensitive data while taking advantage of the security measures provided by the Cloud. According to a study by the Cloud Security Alliance, hybrid clouds can improve security by over 50% compared to traditional on-premise infrastructure.
- Increased efficiency: By utilising a hybrid configuration, businesses can improve their IT efficiency by leveraging the Cloud for data backup and disaster recovery tasks. A study by 451 Research found that enterprises can achieve up to 40% improvement in IT efficiency by using a hybrid cloud solution.
- Flexibility: Hybrid configurations allow businesses to choose the best solution for their specific needs, whether utilising their existing on-premise infrastructure or leveraging the Cloud for additional computing power and storage.
These facts and statistics demonstrate the many benefits businesses can gain from utilising a hybrid configuration using on-premise infrastructure and AWS cloud. Whether you’re looking to improve performance, reduce costs, or streamline your IT operations, a hybrid cloud solution can provide your business’s flexibility and reliability to succeed in today’s competitive market.
‘Maximising Business Efficiency with AWS Cloud and Hybrid Infrastructure’
If you consider connecting your network to AWS, you are Growing and Expanding.
You have evaluated your situation, especially for an established business, and made progress by deploying new services and applications. Sometimes, you have done a refresh program, housekeeping, or consolidation. Older servers have been updated with new AWS virtual hardware, and heavily integrated applications have been untangled and separated, one by one (this helps a lot in Disaster Recovery).
Now is the time to connect all together!
What are the Features and Benefits?
Features are the methods of connecting to AWS from your on-premise network infrastructure. Many benefits that it brings are:
- Merging your on-premises and AWS environment – act like one, easier-to-manage
- Sharing existing services in both infrastructures
- No huge upfront costs for the devices and Comms Room
- Enables you to securely access and manage your resources on AWS from the on-premises network.
- VPN encrypts the entire traffic, so you are safe when using unsecured protocols when connecting between your and AWS network
- Accessing instances in AWS using private IP addresses
What is the compelling client case?
You have launched a few EC2 instances on AWS to test an application, so why wouldn’t you? There are no upfront costs. It took just 30 minutes to spin up several servers. After weeks of testing, everything looks good, and you moved your application to new Prod EC2 instances. However, something is missing; you can’t use the authentication from your on-premise Active Directory or anything else you took for granted in your company environment.
The question was raised: how do I connect my on-premise network to AWS? I would like to ‘merge’ both environments.
We will provide you with the answers in the below paragraphs.
Do you need a dedicated connection between your network and AWS?
For completeness, and before jumping the gun. There may be cases where you don’t need a direct connection or VPN to connect your on-premises network to AWS. Office 365 is hosted in the Cloud, and everyone at home or office is happy using the application without over-complicating the network setup. Remember, the best networks are – Simple Networks! The design varies from business to business, and everyone needs to ask a fundamental question – Do I need this? Perhaps an application or service hosted in AWS can be accessed directly from the Internet using secure protocols; applying more confident and sophisticated authentication like multi-factor authentication will solve the problem. Involving ACL – Access-Lists, Security Groups, and Inbound filtering only to allow users from the corporate network
Our point is to review all the options before committing yourself to a service or solution!
‘Optimising Your Business with Scalable Hybrid AWS Cloud Solutions’
Connect Your Data Center to AWS (Direct Connect)
AWS Direct Connect lets you securely connect your AWS environment to your on-premises data centre or office location over a standard 1Gb or 10Gb Ethernet fibre-optic connection. AWS Direct Connect offers a dedicated high-speed, low-latency connection, which bypasses internet service providers in your network path. An AWS Direct Connect location provides access to Amazon Web Services in the region it is associated with and access to other US regions. In addition, AWS Direct Connect allows you to partition the fibre-optic connections logically into multiple logical connections called virtual local area networks (VLAN). You can use these logical connections to improve security, differentiate traffic, and achieve compliance requirements.
Use AWS Direct Connect to securely link your on-premises environment to AWS.
Data Center to AWS setup demands in-depth planning by the network team.
In most cases, long-term 10Gb resilient uplinks will most suit an organisation. Additionally, a new scope of IP addresses must be allocated at AWS VPC, and it mustn’t conflict with anything you have in the Data Center. A BGP dynamic routing protocol will be configured to allow reachability between the AWS and on-premies environments.
The firewall rule policy will increase the size of your Edge, Extranet, and LAN points.
It may reach 50-100%; ensure you have ‘fat margins’ and scope to handle this increase.
Why? Because you must filter traffic to/from AWS and add more rules and objects to the firewall policy.
Estimate billing, no charges for the connection, but you will pay for data transfer. For example, if you order a 1GB connection to the US East region – Virginia and expect to transfer 1TB out every month, the total cost would be $236 per month.
Complete information on the scope of what you need at AWS
Using Site-to-Site VPN between the on-premises network and AWS
This solution is much quicker to implement, provided that you already have a pair of firewalls or routers (with VPN accelerator hardware) in high-availability mode connected to the Internet, usually at your Extranet Block.
By default, instances you launch into an Amazon VPC can’t communicate with your own (remote) network. However, you can enable access to your remote network from your VPC by creating an AWS Site-to-Site VPN (Site-to-Site VPN) connection and configuring routing to pass traffic through the link.
Although VPN connection is a general term, in this documentation, it refers to the connection between your VPC and your on-premises network. Site-to-site VPN supports Internet Protocol security (IPsec) VPN connections.
A Site-to-Site VPN connection offers two (Active/Standby) VPN tunnels between a virtual private gateway or a transit gateway on the AWS side and a customer gateway on the remote (on-premises) side.
AWS Site-to-Site VPN Documentation
Using Client VPN
Network Team administrators are responsible for setting up and configuring the services; once downloaded, the Client VPN endpoint configuration file is distributed to end-users that require this service. They can connect directly to AWS and services hosted in VPC for the organisation.
The client is the end-user. This person connects to the Client’s VPN endpoint to establish a VPN session. The client sets the VPN session from their local computer or mobile device using an OpenVPN-based VPN client application. After establishing the VPN session, they can securely access the resources in the VPC where the associated subnet is located. They can also access other resources in AWS or an on-premises network if the required route and authorisation rules have been configured. For more information about connecting to a Client VPN endpoint to establish a VPN session
‘Empowering Your Business with Scalable Hybrid Infrastructure and AWS Cloud’
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Lucja Czarnecka
The Blog Post, originally penned in English, underwent a magical metamorphosis into Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish language. If any subtle content lost its sparkle, let’s summon back the original English spark.
