What is AWS Direct Connect?

What is AWS Direct Connect?

Imagine a healthcare company that has legacy data stored on servers in a back office environment. The data must be accessible and available, but it does not need to be accessed regularly to use it in web or mobile applications on the local site. By using AWS Direct Connect, your data remains part of the overall IT environment, but is not dependent on the public Internet for bandwidth, reliability, or security needs. Believe it or not, the Internet is not the perfect all-around solution to everything in business. While the rise of cloud computing, mobile apps, the web, and instant access from anywhere has certainly changed the way we do business, there are still times when networking is more viable when it's not pipelined. through the public Internet. An example of this is a company that has a mix of high-speed, low-latency data transfer needs in the cloud and benefits from scalability and flexibility, but also runs an on-premises data center or has a colocation facility where data is stored at rest and does not need to be accessed regularly by business applications. It is not even necessary for this data to be accessible on the Web or on the Internet. For these applications, what is required is a way to operate the network infrastructure for all your business and data needs. Ingrese a AWS Direct Connect. This network service is like a bridge between critical business activities (for example, a patient database in a hospital or a transactional system for an e-commerce website) and those that are not urgent and do not require troubleshooting. cloud storage. It is a way to benefit and connect the two worlds to form a single infrastructure. Direct Connect, as the name implies, is a way to connect an on-premises, co-location, or back-office infrastructure to a cloud computing environment such as Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) or EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). It's a nod to the fact that not every application or data store can benefit from the cloud, and that companies still have legacy applications. However, it brings these legacy applications to the cloud and makes them accessible. One of the best examples of where AWS Direct Connect could meet the needs of a business is when there is a project that is not mission critical. The data may be stored on servers at your head office, but it does not need to be immediately accessible. In fact, you may not need to access data stores on the public Internet. Direct Connect can help you create a network connection between this private data store at your location. The connection is between Amazon AWS in the cloud but not over the Internet.

AWS Direct Connect benefits

Interestingly, another benefit relates to expanded management of your IT infrastructure. Although you may have fixed data center locations or back office servers, you can still adjust bandwidth for direct connection from 1 Gbps to up to 10 Gbps, and you can always configure your infrastructure to meet the changing needs of your applications and data. . You can add more virtual interfaces, provision more AWS resources, and make decisions about legacy data or data at rest to increase availability or performance as your business needs change. In short, you always benefit from a cloud computing infrastructure and the decisions you can make to scale up or down. One of the most important benefits of using AWS Direct Connect is the cost. Legacy applications, non-mission critical data, or even projects, applications, and databases that simply don't need performance or scalability High performance is sometimes always moved to a cloud infrastructure, since there is no way to maintain the servers on-site premise. It ends up costing more. With Direct Connect, there is less cost to access the network from local services to Amazon services like S3 or EC2, without going through the Internet entirely. This means lower costs, because you don't have to pay for Internet access or overage fees, and because Direct Connect offers a lower cost structure. As you can imagine, the "direct" connection between on-premises and the cloud also reduces the risk of congestion, network outages or outages, and interference on the public Internet. . Direct Connect is easy to use. It runs in the AWS console interface, and there are templates you can use to configure virtual interfaces so that everything is transparent and obvious in terms of data being transmitted from which locations to the cloud. With the AWS Console, you can see your entire infrastructure from one interface with a global view of operations.