By Fady Masoud, Infinera
Driven by the need for greater productivity and lower costs, enterprises around the globe are moving their applications to the cloud. Today, nine out of 10 enterprises are using at least one cloud application to increase productivity and reduce cost, a fact that is not surprising when 84 percent of chief information officers report that they have cut application costs by moving to the cloud[1]. Compounded by the need foreseeable bandwidth driven by the proliferation of large volumes of digital content and applications,enterprises are turning to a new hybrid cloud network model, with applications delivered from an abstracted cloud services layer that bridges private and public cloud infrastructures. This article describes how cable operators can use the latest software and hardware innovation in optical networking to deliver advanced, secure and high-performance business services to the enterprise, such as software defined capacity (SDC), optical private network virtualization, data encryption and many others, to underpin the deployment of cloud enterprise applications. Common challenges and solutions for cable operators as they build and deliver key enterprise applications are also presented, such as business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR), data mirroring, off-hours/off site data backup and many others. This paper also describes best practices and emerging operational models to reduce first-in costs as well as recurring operational expenditures.