Liberty Global and Juniper Networks collaborate

Juniper Networks and Liberty Global have announced the successful completion of a joint proof-of-concept (POC) designed to deliver a high-quality seamless user experience for customers with data and applications spread across multiple cloud environments.

The POC demonstrated a cost-efficient, software-programmable, secure and seamless way to consistently connect services and applications hosted in disparate locations and across different cloud technologies. The POC was built on Juniper Cloud Interlink, which automates the creation and management of assured, hybrid, multicloud networks across public cloud, on-premises and co-located data centers. Juniper Cloud Interlink is currently in advanced development within Juniper Beyond Labs, an innovation hub that pioneers user experience-led networking.

As a network provider to millions of consumer and business customers, Liberty Global is keen to explore innovative ways to enhance cloud connectivity solutions for its customers, as they navigate the complexity of hybrid multicloud architectures while maintaining secure, high-quality user experiences at scale.

Increasingly business customers are migrating their applications and data to the cloud to benefit from improved resilience, elasticity and scalability. But due to a mix of technological, functionality and commercial reasons, customers typically select different cloud environments and locations, including centralized and edge locations for supporting present and future applications. A typical medium/large enterprise has several systems looking after different aspects of their business, such as logistical handling, components drawings, design, manufacturing, inventory, customer ordering, payments. These systems are likely to be hosted in different cloud environments to suit specific aspects such as performance, data storage and processing costs, geographical locations. Such business needs translate into an increased number of customers grappling with connecting multiple applications and services across various cloud-based technologies, providers and locations for a wide range of internal and external uses. Liberty Global serves thousands of business customers, delivering advanced connectivity, unified communication, security and IT managed services, generating annual revenue exceeding $3bn; consequently, the company can anticipate a future demand for multi-cloud connectivity.

Current methods of connecting to multiple heterogeneous clouds are inconsistent, each with their own best practices, tools, platforms and limitations. Collectively this creates a challenging environment that can put application Service Level Expectations (SLEs), security policies and the ability for customers to select the optimal cloud solution for each type of their data and applications at risk.

Streamlining and Simplifying Multicloud Connectivity for Customers

The POC represents a significant step forward for the Liberty Global Technology team seeking innovative solutions to streamline and simplify the multicloud connectivity for its customers. Juniper Cloud Interlink was selected for a rigorous POC to test the capabilities of this innovative technology to enable secure, reliable provider- and location-agnostic hybrid multicloud connectivity that can be combined with other existing cloud solutions. Juniper Cloud Interlink Gateways were deployed in an AWS Outpost on LG premises in Reading, UK and in regional Clouds environments from AWS and Google.

The Juniper Cloud Interlink Gateways were successfully interconnected within hours—instead of weeks—and supported advanced yet easy-to-operate network and security services whilst maintaining consistent policies end-to-end.

Juniper Cloud Interlink from Juniper also met Liberty Global’s stringent operational requirements by ensuring applications and SLEs were upheld, providing proactive anomaly detection, immediate root cause discovery, automated notifications and faster Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) and Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) on networking issues across the fabric. This functionality is designed for service providers and enterprises, so they can develop and bring new revenue-generating services to market more quickly, while maintaining the highest standards of user experience.

Liberty and Juniper intend to continue cooperating in the development of the technology until it reaches the required level of maturity for its commercial introduction.