Reducing firewall costs with IZO™ Multi-Cloud Connect

In today’s dynamic digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly embracing multi-cloud strategies to leverage the unique strengths and services offered by various cloud providers. However, this distributed approach often introduces significant complexity, cost, and management overhead, particularly when it comes to establishing and maintaining robust multi-cloud connectivity.

Tata Communications addresses these challenges head-on with its IZO™+ Multi-Cloud Connect, a sophisticated software-defined interconnect-as-a-service solution designed to streamline multi-cloud environments. It empowers organisations to securely and seamlessly connect their critical applications, data centres, branch offices, and diverse cloud instances through a unified, “single pane of glass” management interface.

This article is part of a series that explores real-world use cases where Tata Communications has helped customers optimise their cloud infrastructure. Let’s look into a common yet critical scenario: Landing Zone Consolidation.

Understanding the cloud landing zone

For any network or cloud architect embarking on a cloud adoption journey, creating and managing a “landing zone” is a foundational step. A landing zone is essentially a pre-configured, secure, and scalable environment that provides a robust foundation for deploying cloud workloads. Think of it as a meticulously prepared blueprint or a safe starting point. It includes all the essential components required to run applications safely and efficiently within a cloud provider’s ecosystem, including:

• Network infrastructure: Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) or Virtual Networks (VNets), subnets, and routing rules to ensure proper traffic flow and segmentation.
• Security controls: Firewalls, security groups, and Network Access Control Lists (NACLs) to protect resources from unauthorised access and cyber threats.
• Governance policies: Rules and guidelines that enforce compliance, resource tagging, and cost management.
• Identity management: Integration with Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems to control who can access what resources.
• Monitoring and logging tools: Solutions for tracking performance, identifying issues, and maintaining an audit trail of activities.

Companies deploy landing zones to accelerate cloud adoption while simultaneously ensuring that critical network, security, and compliance requirements are met from the outset. It acts as a controlled, policy-driven framework for scaling applications across various cloud environments, whether it’s an AWS landing zone, an Azure landing zone, or a GCP landing zone.

The challenge: Multi-cloud landing zone sprawl

While the benefits of a multi-cloud strategy are clear, many organisations struggle with the unintended consequences of incremental cloud adoption. It’s natural for IT departments to integrate clouds one by one based on evolving business needs and specific project requirements. This often leads to a proliferation of distinct landing zones; each tailored to a particular cloud provider.

Consider the predicament of an insurance company with which we recently partnered. Their multi-cloud strategy had evolved, resulting in multiple disparate landing zones. This fragmented architecture led to significant concerns regarding escalating costs and cumbersome management overheads. To illustrate the scale of their challenge, for each of the three cloud providers they utilised, their existing setup required two compute Virtual Machines (VMs) and two Palo Alto Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) licenses. This resulted in a total of six compute VMs and six Palo Alto NGFW licenses being deployed across their entire multi-cloud estate. Such duplication not only inflated operational expenses but also introduced considerable complexity in terms of configuration, patching, and policy enforcement across different environments.

Also Read: SBC infrastructure optimisation with IZO™+ Multi-Cloud Connect.

The solution: Strategic consolidation of the landing zone through our multi-cloud network hub proposition under multi-cloud connect.

When the insurance company approached Tata Communications, seeking a more efficient and cost-effective approach, we proposed a strategic Consolidation of Landing Zone. Our solution is centred on creating a common, centralised landing zone anchored by a Tata Communications IZO™+ Multi-Cloud Connect node. This innovative approach fundamentally transformed their multi-cloud architecture.

The impact was immediate and profound. Instead of maintaining six compute VMs and six Palo Alto NGFW licenses, the consolidated architecture required only two compute VMs and two Palo Alto NGFW licenses to service all three clouds. This represented a remarkable 66% reduction in core landing zone components. Furthermore, Tata Communications’ internet services (via Tata Communications ILL – Internet Leased Line) were leveraged to connect users and consumers directly to the applications hosted across their consolidated multi-cloud environment, optimising data flow and reducing reliance on costly third-party internet services.

Also Read: Seamless OMS integration for fintech firm via IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect

Tangible benefits and business impact

The strategic consolidation of the landing zone delivered significant benefits:

• Substantial cost reduction: A 66% decrease in landing zone components, including compute VMs and Palo Alto NGFW licenses, led to considerable savings. Additionally, leveraging Tata Communications for internet connectivity reduced data egress charges.
• Minimized management overhead: As a co-managed solution, Tata Communications IZO™+ Multi-Cloud Connect significantly alleviated the daily operational burden, allowing internal IT teams to concentrate on strategic initiatives.
• Enhanced agility and simplicity: The consolidated environment simplifies new workload deployment and service expansion across clouds. Its “single pane of glass” management offers a unified control point for policies, performance monitoring, and troubleshooting.
• Strengthened security posture: Centralised firewall management and consistent security policy application through the IZO™ node ensure robust protection, mitigating vulnerabilities inherent in fragmented architectures.
• Scalability: As the customer is growing, there is a need for multiple network and security functions consolidation. Our multi-cloud network hub’s ability to support service chaining has helped customer to deploy load balancer in tandem with nextgen firewall. There are also future possibilities of deploying DDI or DNS DHCP and IPAM functionalities.

Is Landing Zone Consolidation right for you?

The scenario faced by our insurance client is not unique. Many organisations find themselves with a sprawling cloud network architecture, resulting in inefficiencies and unnecessary costs. If you identify with this challenge and your organisation is grappling with the complexities of managing multiple GCP landing zones, AWS landing zones, or Azure landing zones, Dynamic 365 and Oracle landing zones instances, it’s time to explore the benefits of consolidation.

Tata Communications IZO™+ Multi-Cloud Connect offers a proven path to simplify your multi-cloud connectivity, reduce operational overhead, and achieve significant cost savings through intelligent landing zone consolidation.

Ready to optimise your multi-cloud environment? Schedule a consultation with us today to discover how Tata Communications IZO™+ Multi Cloud Connect can help you achieve significant cost savings and streamlined management. Start your trial today!