VMware

AWS Announces General Availability of AWS Cloud WAN

AWS Announces
Amazon Web Services, Inc. an Amazon.com, Inc. company announced the general availability of AWS Cloud WAN, a new managed wide area network service that connects on-premises data centers, colocation facilities, branch offices, and cloud resources to simplify operating a global network. Using a central management dashboard built into AWS Cloud WAN, customers can define their network configuration, view the health of their global network, and automate routine configuration and security tasks. With AWS Cloud WAN, enterprises can access the AWS global network to build a single, unified network for their organization to improve network health, performance, and security. 

Many wide area networks used by enterprises today consist of a patchwork of connections between branch offices and data centers that were optimized for applications that run on premises. As the edge of the cloud continues to be pushed outward, and more customers move their applications to AWS to become more agile, reduce complexity, and save money, they need an easier way to evolve their networks to support a modern, distributed model that allows them to reach their customers and end users globally with high performance. With AWS Cloud WAN, enterprises can simplify their operations and leave the time-consuming task of managing complex webs of networks behind.”

David Brown, vice president of Amazon EC2 at AWS

To get started, customers can build their global networks in the AWS Cloud WAN central management dashboard by first selecting the AWS Regions closest to their on-premises locations and adding their Amazon Virtual Private Clouds. After extending their existing WAN to AWS, customers can add and remove remote locations and data centers with just a few clicks in the dashboard or by using the AWS Cloud WAN application programming interface (API). AWS Cloud WAN is available in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Milan), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), and Middle East (Bahrain). For more details on AWS Cloud WAN, visit aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-cloud-wan-a-managed-wan-service.

Avalara builds cloud-based tax compliance solutions for businesses of all sizes, across industries globally, addressing needs from indirect tax calculation, returns, remittance, and document management, to business licensing, tax answers, insurance premium tax, property tax compliance, and more. “We expect AWS Cloud WAN to provide us the opportunity to transform our network by interconnecting our global AWS presence, while ensuring segmentation of business functions,” said Brian Capps, senior director of network engineering at Avalara. “We expect it to simplify management, routing, and security—consolidating complex configurations to be deployed as infrastructure as code.”

Cisco is the worldwide leader in technology that powers the Internet. “In today’s world, organizations need fast, secure, and scalable connectivity across global cloud and on-premises environments. To meet these demands, it’s imperative to provide innovative networking and security solutions that are flexible and easy to use,” said Chris Stori, senior vice president and general manager at Cisco Networking Experiences. “Cisco continues to invest in cloud networking by integrating the Cisco SD-WAN product portfolios with AWS Cloud WAN to securely connect multi-AWS Region workloads, increase application performance, and reduce deployment times.”

Foundation Medicine is a pioneer in molecular profiling for cancer, working to shape the future of clinical care and research by helping physicians make informed treatment decisions for their patients and empowering researchers to develop new medicines. “AWS Cloud WAN simplifies how Foundation Medicine connects our globally distributed labs and cloud resources,” said Karl Langdon, head of cloud infrastructure at Foundation Medicine. “This streamlined system supports efficient collaboration between departments and sites, which enables us to provide doctors and researchers with the insights they need to improve patient access to precision cancer care.”

Slalom is a global consulting firm focused on technology and business transformation that helps organizations innovate and scale for business agility. “With AWS Cloud WAN, we immediately recognized its network segmentation capability as an accelerator that could greatly reduce the effort and complexity of network provisioning and routing automation. It did not disappoint,” said Charlie Christina, platform engineering principal at Slalom. “The ease of defining the core network, segmentation, and attachment policies via a single policy document greatly simplified global network creation. With AWS Cloud WAN our estimate for a recent network transformation project for a leading genomics company that wanted a fully automated, self-servicing high performance computing (HPC) solution was accurately reduced from months to weeks, and it allowed us to focus time and energy on the network-attached HPC design.”

VMware is a leading innovator in enterprise software and cloud services for all apps, enabling digital innovation with enterprise control. “Delivering critical networking, security, and edge compute services to employee devices located anywhere is a top priority for enterprise IT teams,” said Craig Connors, vice president and general manager of VMware's SASE business. “The integration of VMware SD-WAN, a VMware SASE service, and AWS Cloud WAN, provides a networking architecture to deliver compute across the distributed edge, while providing more secure and high-quality application performance of workloads in AWS environments, regardless of user location. Through this partnership, customers can achieve seamless connectivity from users to clouds.”

About Amazon Web Services
For over 15 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud offering. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any cloud workload, and it now has more than 200 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 84 Availability Zones within 26 geographic regions, with announced plans for 24 more Availability Zones and eight more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. 

About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth’s Best Employer, and Earth’s Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon.

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Leostream Enhances Security and Management of vSphere Hybrid Cloud Deployments

Business Wire | January 29, 2024

Leostream Corporation, the world's leading Remote Desktop Access Platform provider, today announced features to enhance security, management, and end-user productivity in vSphere-based hybrid cloud environments. The Leostream platform strengthens end-user computing (EUC) capabilities for vSphere users, including secure access to both on-premises and cloud environments, heterogeneous support, and reduced cloud costs. With the Leostream platform as the single pane of glass managing EUC environments, any hosted desktop environment, including individual virtual desktops, multi-user sessions, hosted physical workstations or desktops, and hosted applications, becomes simpler to manage, more secure, more flexible, and more cost-effective. Significant ways the Leostream platform expands vSphere’s capabilities include: Security The Leostream platform ensures data remains locked in the corporate network, and works across on-premises and cloud environments, providing even disparate infrastructures with the same levels of security and command over authorization, control, and access tracking. The Leostream platform supports multi-factor authentication and allows organizations to enforce strict access control rules, creating an EUC environment modeled on a zero-trust architecture. Multivendor/protocol support The Leostream platform was developed from the ground up for heterogeneous infrastructures and as the connection management layer of the EUC environment, the Leostream platform allows organizations to leverage vSphere today and other hypervisors or hyperconvergence platforms in the future as their needs evolve. The Leostream platform supports the industry’s broadest array of remote display protocols, including specialized protocols for mission-critical tasks. Consistent EUC experience The Leostream platform enables IT to make changes to the underlying environment while ensuring the end user experience is constant, and to incorporate AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or OpenStack private clouds into their environment without disruptions in end-user productivity. By integrating with corporate Identity Providers (IdPs) that employees are already familiar with, and providing employees with a single portal they use to sign in, the Leostream platform offers simplicity to users too. Connectivity The Leostream Gateway securely connects to on-prem and cloud resources without virtual private networks (VPNs), and eliminates the need to manage and maintain security groups. End users get the same seamless login and high-performance connection across hybrid environments including corporate resources located off the internet. Controlling cloud costs The Leostream Connection Broker implements automated rules that control capacity and power state in the cloud, allowing organizations to optimize their cloud usage and minimize costs, such as ensuring cloud instances aren’t left running when they are no longer needed. The Connection Broker also intelligently pools and shares resources across groups of users, so organizations can invest in fewer systems, reducing overall cost of ownership. “These features deliver a streamlined experience with vSphere and hybrid or multi-cloud resources so end users remain productive, and corporate data and applications remain secure,” said Leostream CEO Karen Gondoly. “At a time when there is uncertainty about the future of support for VMware’s end-user computing, it’s important to bring these options to the market to show that organizations can extend vSphere’s capabilities and simultaneously plan for the future without disruption to the workforce.” About Leostream Corporation Leostream Corporation, the global leader in Remote Desktop Access Platforms, offers comprehensive solutions that enable seamless work-from-anywhere environments for individuals across diverse industries, regardless of organization size or location. The core of the Leostream platform is its commitment to simplicity and insight. It is driven by a unified administrative console that streamlines the management of users, cloud desktops, and IT assets while providing real-time dashboards for informed decision-making. The company continually monitors the evolving remote desktop landscape, anticipating future trends and challenges. This purposeful, proactive approach keeps clients well-prepared for the dynamic changes in remote desktop technology.

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