The Cloud and the connectivity to it are inextricably linked. Yet, we often see that organizations forget to consider the importance of a good connection when choosing a Cloud solution. If you want to make the most of a Cloud solution, the connection should never be the bottleneck.
Most people think of connectivity as the internet you use at home for things like Netflix and gaming. For business users, however, connectivity means much more. Because an organization's Cloud is located at an external site, your connection is the path to it. If this path becomes congested or blocked, your access to the Cloud is disrupted. For organizations that rely on Cloud applications for their operations, this can become a business-critical issue.
At Fundaments, we use connections in various ways to provide the optimal 'cloud experience'.
THE FUNDAMENTS CORE NETWORK: A SOLID FOUNDATION
At Fundaments, we use our core network to ensure our Cloud remains available. This core network is based on a 10 Gigabit per second infrastructure, and depending on the connection, a multiple of that is deployed. The core network connects our data centers to one another. We have multiple data centers in the Netherlands: in the east (Hengelo and Enschede) and the west (Amsterdam & Schiphol-Rijk). When a primary environment runs with us in Twente, the data is always backed up to Amsterdam. The same principle applies in reverse, ensuring we can always guarantee that backups are stored far enough away from the production location.
All data centers are connected via a redundant fiber-optic ring. In addition, we have selected specific locations where we connect to the internet and to various types of networks, such as healthcare networks, municipal networks, and parties like NDIX. No production workloads (IaaS/PaaS services) are used at these locations, ensuring that any impact on network links (internet) does not affect our other services.
Internet connections are established at two locations: these locations serve as each other's redundancy, and we ensure at least two transit providers per location. This allows us to partially route internet traffic if necessary, and thanks to this multiple redundancy, we never have to announce maintenance that impacts internet services.
DIRECT CLOUD CONNECTION THANKS TO NDIX: FAST AND DIRECT
As mentioned above, one of the network parties we connect with, besides the internet, is NDIX (Nederlands-Duitse Internet Exchange). NDIX is a platform where users and providers of all types of ICT services are connected. Fundaments is also connected to NDIX. The NDIX network is organized in rings, just like the Fundaments network. If one connection fails, the NDIX platform can always be reached via another path, so that outages on parts of the NDIX routes have no impact on availability.
When you, as a user, purchase a fiber-optic connection with an NDIX link, it is possible to access your Cloud at Fundaments without using public networks like the internet. This offers several advantages: it is more secure and often provides faster and more stable performance than a regular internet connection. Furthermore, it is more cost-efficient because you do not need additional internet connectivity on top of your NDIX connection.
THE DDOS SCRUBBING CENTER: FOR CLEAN INTERNET TRAFFIC
One of the other parties we connect with is the DDoS scrubbing center of the NBIP (National Internet Providers Management Organization). This connection gives Fundaments the ability to 'scrub' internet traffic of attack traffic.
Unfortunately, the risk of a DDoS attack remains current. At Fundaments, if you purchase internet from us, you have the option to use the national scrubbing center of the NBIP. This so-called DDoS scrubbing center ensures that your organization is protected against unwanted attacks and therefore remains accessible at all times. During a DDoS attack, the DDoS traffic is 'scrubbed'. In this way, the DDoS traffic and legitimate traffic are separated, after which the clean traffic is sent back to the Fundaments network. Your service, website, application, or email traffic continues to function, and your employees and customers will notice almost nothing of the redirection.
NETWORK CONNECTIVITY WITH PUBLIC CLOUD
We are seeing growing demand for services delivered from the public Cloud. Whether it concerns a Microsoft-based service or one from AWS or Google, alternative connection options—beyond the internet—are increasingly being considered by our Cloud users. Fundaments also provides for this by connecting to these public Clouds via, for example, an ExpressRoute to Azure or an AWS DirectConnect. While these connections were previously mainly high-bandwidth and costly, you can now purchase them starting from 50 Mbit per second. This can be very useful if the internet does not meet your needs in terms of security or performance (latency).
