Intelligent Cloud-Network

What Is an Intelligent Cloud-Network?

A cloud-network refers to a network facilitating connections between clouds, enhancing enterprises and individuals with significant intelligence and computational capabilities, thereby invigorating the digital economy. This intelligent cloud-network, marked by digitalization, intelligence, and servitization, offers smart connections to aid enterprise cloud adoption, thus expediting digital advancement across various industries.

Why Do We Need the Intelligent Cloud-Network?

The need for an intelligent cloud-network stems from its role as a transformative force akin to the power grid during the second industrial revolution. Just as the power grid distributed electricity from stations to industries and households, the cloud serves as the core technology generating computing power and intelligence in the fourth industrial revolution. The intelligent cloud-network operates as a modern-day "power grid" in the digital economy, transferring significant intelligence and computing power to both enterprises and individuals, thereby injecting fresh momentum into the digital economy.

Characterized by digitalization, intelligence, and servitization, the intelligent cloud-network provides intelligent, service-oriented capabilities to enhance enterprise cloud adoption.

As global digitalization accelerates, driven by advancements in digitalization technologies and supported by national strategies and digital transformation trends, a growing number of enterprises are migrating their services to the cloud. Additionally, production cloudification, which places high demands on networks, is expected to be the future direction of development.

However, amid cloud-driven industry transformation and accelerating enterprise cloudification, carrier cloud-networks face four major challenges:

• Disparity in Service Provisioning Speed: While cloud service provisioning is rapid due to the development of enterprise digitalization, network service provisioning is slow, taking months to establish a connection between the enterprise and the cloud.

• Difficulty in Multi-cloud Access: Enterprises face challenges in accessing multiple clouds, as current methods often involve purchasing multiple cloud private lines, leading to inefficiencies.

• Challenges in Ensuring a Deterministic Experience: Cloudification of core enterprise services necessitates high bandwidth and low delay, but traditional Quality of Service (QoS) technologies struggle to guarantee service level agreements (SLAs) or provide a deterministic and visualized service experience.

• Lack of Collaboration in Cloud-Network-Security: Service cloudification transcends the boundaries of enterprise networks, necessitating a shift from single-point protection provided by firewalls to end-to-end integrated security solutions spanning devices, networks, clouds, and applications.

Key Features of the Intelligent Cloud-Network

The intelligent cloud-network introduces four key features to tackle the primary challenges encountered by traditional networks, namely: Network as a Service (NaaS), flexible multi-cloud connection, deterministic experience, and cloud-network-security collaboration. These attributes empower carriers to develop advanced cloud-network convergence service capabilities.

• Network as a Service (NaaS)

Network as a Service (NaaS) within the context of the intelligent cloud-network involves the coordination and mutual scheduling of cloud and network resources to alleviate the existing mismatch between them. Presently, the cloud and network operate as separate entities, resulting in challenges in provisioning cloud-network services and managing faults, which are both time-consuming and labor-intensive. This situation also complicates northbound integration. However, the intelligent cloud-network introduces NaaS capabilities for enterprise users, which offer several advantages:

- Rapid service provisioning: Service deployment time is significantly reduced from the industry average of several days to just minutes when resources are available. SRv6 technology enhances cloud access and multi-cloud connectivity. The network controller simplifies deployment with one-click delivery of network slices and services.

- Efficient fault localization: SRv6 ensures end-to-end service delivery, minimizing network interruptions. The network controller monitors network and service SLAs, automatically identifying and locating network faults, with over 90% identified within 5 minutes, promoting network self-healing.

- Streamlined network interface design: Service APIs decrease integration complexity by presenting tenant-level parameters, reducing parameters by 90%. This design enables flexible resource invocation and easy visualization within the operations domain, facilitating northbound integration.

• Flexible Multi-cloud Connection

Facilitating multi-cloud access, the flexible multi-cloud connection enables users to establish one connection to multiple clouds. Enterprises previously had limited cloud needs, often segregating services between public and private clouds. However, as enterprise IT evolves, core systems are shifting to public or industry clouds. Consequently, large and mid-sized enterprises, along with various industries, now demand multi-cloud access for diverse cloud scenarios. With this shift, multi-cloud or hybrid cloud models have become imperative. Cloud PE within the cloud backbone network pre-connects to multiple clouds, enabling users to access applications from various providers via a single network carrier's cloud private line. Similarly, network PE within the cloud backbone network connects to multiple networks, allowing enterprises to achieve extensive network connectivity through a single access point linked to the carrier network.

• Deterministic Experience

In a traditional IP network, bandwidth is shared among links, leading to unpredictable performance. Additionally, network delays and jitter can impact service quality. When network faults occur, the response is typically passive, requiring manual intervention and leading to uncertain recovery times. However, the intelligent cloud-network employs innovative technologies like slicing to isolate critical services, ensuring users receive a private network-level service experience with guaranteed bandwidth and network performance. Furthermore, intelligent Operations and Maintenance (O&M) practices proactively monitor service quality, enabling issues to be identified before they impact users. The intelligent network controller can automatically address faults based on learned patterns, further enhancing service reliability.

• Cloud-Network-Security Collaboration

With the growing deployment of services on the cloud, users are increasingly concerned about security issues regarding cloud access, encompassing both cloud platform and network security. Traditionally, network security focused on defending against attacks on individual network devices using a single-point defense approach. However, the intelligent cloud-network solution suggests collaboration between cloud and network security through security policies. The concept involves the network controller enforcing security policies to protect network infrastructure, while the cloud controller ensures cloud security. To achieve integrated cloud-network security, a network-wide security monitoring and processing platform is deployed. This platform monitors the security of the cloud-network infrastructure and collaborates with both the network and cloud controllers. Through intelligent analysis, this platform accurately identifies security events, responds to security alerts promptly, and mitigates threats at their source, significantly increasing the threat detection rate from 60% to 96%.

These features collectively empower carriers to overcome traditional network challenges and establish advanced cloud-network convergence service capabilities, thereby meeting the evolving demands of the digital economy era.

Applications of the Intelligent Cloud-Network

Carriers

Successful implementation of the Intelligent Cloud-Network has empowered carriers to optimize their network resources and extend their service offerings. They achieve this by integrating various resources, including their proprietary clouds and public cloud services, to deliver coordinated cloud-network services to enterprise users. This strategic move expands the business scope of cloud-networks.

• Cloud Backbone Network:

Carriers transition from offering basic cloud access to delivering multi-cloud services. By linking diverse clouds—public, private, third-party, and industry-specific—via their cloud backbone network, they establish physical connections between clouds and networks.

• Cloud Metro Network:

Tailored to the needs of government and enterprise clients, the cloud metro network furnishes secure and high-quality slice-based private line networks connecting enterprises with clouds. Leveraging underlay-overlay collaboration, this network facilitates seamless access to multiple clouds and provides on-demand network SLA assurance for superior service reliability.

• Hyper-Converged Data Center Network:

Intelligent traffic control within data centers achieves zero packet loss and ensures uninterrupted service delivery, even across intra-city active-active data centers. Network-wide intelligent O&M detects faults within minutes, enabling swift self-healing and ensuring round-the-clock service availability.

Industry Users

The Intelligent Cloud-Network finds applications across diverse sectors such as government, healthcare, education, finance, mining, ports, steel, and electric power.

• Government:

For carrier A, the intelligent cloud-network solution facilitates the establishment of a dedicated network for government and enterprise services. This network supports smart government applications, delivering network and cloud access services to a wide array of organizations and terminals across the city.

• Healthcare:

Through carrier B, the intelligent cloud-network solution provides rapid cloud access and interconnection services for healthcare organizations, meeting regional healthcare industry requirements and fostering information sharing among medical alliances.

• Education:

Addressing resource imbalances and silos, the intelligent cloud-network solution enhances education resource sharing and reduces redundant investments.

• Electric Power:

Employing advanced technologies, the intelligent cloud-network solution offers deterministic network experiences for electric power users, driving digital transformation within power grids and facilitating the transition to the energy Internet era.