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WorldDirector multicloud architecture

Blog, E-government, Globally distributed cloud hosting, Globally distributed DNS Network, Globally distributed mail services, Managed cloud services, Streaming

WorldDirector in a multicloud architecture

Moving to a multi-cloud environment is a big decision that requires careful consideration of the pros and cons and a thorough evaluation of your organisation’s readiness. The benefits of cost savings, resiliency, and new feature enhancements are undeniable, but it’s essential to understand the challenges and limitations of an immersive environment before making a movie. With the proper planning and assistance from cloud providers, organisations can successfully migrate to an amulti-cloudd climate.

Multi-cloud architectures, in which different cloud providers host multiple services, are becoming increasingly popular among organisations.

According to Eurostat, 41% of enterprises in the European Union used cloud computing in 2021. Hosting in the cloud can save on initial infrastructure, planned and unexpected maintenance, and operational costs. However, there are challenges and complexities associated with adopting a multi-cloud architecture that organisations should consider.

Challenges in multi-cloud migration

One of the organisations’ most significant challenges when migrating to the cloud is choosing the right platform. Sometimes, the choice is made for them, for example, when certain outsourced services work only with certain cloud providers. In other cases, organisations had become locked into using a specific cloud vendor when applications were first moved to the cloud. Another challenge associated with running a multi-cloud architecture centres on security. Organisations need to apply a consistent security policy across all cloud platforms compatible with the security policy of internal systems. This can be challenging because different cloud providers have other security protocols.

Milano Ventures’ WorldDirector technology as a fully-managed multi-cloud enabler

Milano Ventures Ltd help managers and leaders understand the challenges of migrating to and securing a multi-cloud infrastructure. Our technology,y called WorldDirector, is offered as a fully managed service across distributed private and public clouds. It operates natively on multi-cloud environments, including proprietary and secure “edge” technologies designed to secure and protect the client’s data and applications.

WorldDirector as globally distributed , self resilient multicloudOverall, a multi-cloud architecture can provide many benefits for an organisation but also comes with challenges. Choosing the right platform and ensuring a consistent security policy across all cloud platforms are two key considerations organisations must consider when migrating to a multi-cloud infrastructure.

Benefits of moving to a multi-cloud infrastructure

The future of IT projects is in the cloud, and the benefits of cost savings, resiliency, and new feature enhancements that organisations realise by moving to the cloud are too great to ignore. However, moving to the cloud and a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environment differs. Milano Ventures Ltd helps small and large organisations evaluate which strategy suits their applications.

When deciding whether to move to a multi-cloud environment, weighing the pros and cons is essential. The first step is to examine where the application currently sits. Is it hosted in a data centre managed by your organisation, colocated, or is it already hosted in a cloud provider’s data centre? Many organisations start by moving their application to a single cloud provider first to understand the experience and the challenges associated with cloud migration.

Milano Ventures multi-cloud consulting services

Another essential factor is how much control your team will surrender to the cloud providers. Cloud providers offer a range of services, from the most basic, in which the cloud provider provides hardware and a range of IP addresses, all the way up to a fully managed service. The service you choose is also a budgetary matter. The more cloud provider services you use, the greater the costs.

It’s also essential to determine how quickly your provider installs patches and to thoroughly document code and dependencies before moving to a multi-cloud environment. It would help if you also demanded the same from your cloud providers. You must fully understand the organisation’s services, the cloud providers’ patching cycles, and how to get support if something goes wrong.

Milano Ventures multicloud migration consultingDesigning for a multi-cloud infrastructure often means redesigning your application to accommodate a more complex networking and infrastructure environment. At Milano Ventures Ltd., we have developed our multi-cloud technology so that such modifications are often unnecessary, as WorldDirector can be transparent to users and application data.

We have architects on staff who can help answer any questions from your team and offer tips to make the migration process smoother. Cloud architects are a valuable and expensive resource for many organisations, so often, it pays to have these competencies outsourced when evaluating a migration to a multi-cloud platform.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us for more details.

What is WorldDirector?

Blog, E-government, Globally distributed cloud hosting, Globally distributed DNS Network, Globally distributed mail services, Managed cloud services, Streaming

What is WorldDirector?

WorldDirector is a fully managed Internet cloud technology used to create globally distributed, geographically load-balanced private and public clouds or Content Delivery Networks (CDN) designed to accelerate content from enterprise (private cloud) and public cloud data centres to remote clients at the edge of the Internet. WorldDirector is the first-ever technology of this kind, developed in 1994 and deployed since 1995.

In 1994, the WorldDirector design’s original aim was to overcome the effects of a massive earthquake that would keep Silicon Valley servers out of reach for several weeks.

WorldDirector has evolved into a modular product and is offered as a service (PaaS, IaaS), optionally with open source or custom applications (SaaS). It also includes content acceleration by HTTP compression, antivirus, anti-malware, anti-trojans, anti-worm, anti-crypto lockers filters and DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service) protection local and global load balancing, intrinsic disaster recovery by active and passive data duplication across several data-centres. WorldDIrector may also be used to provide an effective and inexpensive solution to disaster recovery and can be bundled to offer cloud services, such as hosting, colocation, email services, DNS, data archives, backups, and audio and video streaming.

WorldDirector was nominated for the IST Prize

IST Prize nomination

In 2003, the European IST prize selected WorldDirector as a “European IST Prize Nominee”. The European IST Prize was the most distinguished award for innovative European IT products. Selection criteria for the prize included technical excellence, creative content, potential market impact, capacity to generate employment, contribution to the acceptance and understanding of IST in society, and likely social impact.

From the product perspective, WorldDirector ensures that Internet connectivity is the most efficient and reliable on the market at the best cost of ownership. WorldDirector can enable any site or Internet application. All that is needed is that one of our Linux devices containing WorldDirector hardware and software is placed close to the customer’s server and/or at the ISP’s Web farm. WorldDirector does not require any ‘extra’ software installed on the Client software or the client-server side. There is no ‘Plug-in’ at the server or client end, nor any modification to the server application needed.

WorldDirector is currently available under license or as a fully managed service, including hardware and software to install a complete WorldDirector CDN solution. It is open to host end-user applications, ISPs, and corporate accounts. WorldDirector is offered at Wornex data centres in Europe, the USA and Asia (including as an option AWS, Google and Azure cloud locations) and provides service to 300+ websites, B2B & B2C applications, portals and streaming services on behalf of customers in Italy, Germany, Switzerland and the USA.

WorldDirector as globally distributed , self resilient multicloud

Which innovative features does WorldDirector provide?

In 2015, WorldDirector was re-developed into a modular product and included the following features:

  • Edge caching for Internet servers and applications, regardless of protocol (HTTP, FTP, TCP/IP, UDP, etc.);
  • Multimedia streaming (audio & video) enabler from multiple locations to bring multimedia content close to the edge of the Internet and to the end-user;
  • HTTP content acceleration via standard IETF Content-Encoding to any Web site, regardless of the server’s operating system, HTTP origin server or type of Internet application;
  • Static and dynamic web server accelerator: adds scalability at a lower cost to any web portal or application. Offers more than 40 times increased performance for dynamic portals, with more than 200 concurrent accesses.
  • Global and local load balancing: this will automatically reduce response time under high load and significantly reduce the burden on the origin website. Compared to other systems, more edge servers are not required. Each WorldDirector node’s cost is a fraction of the origin Web server in the case of large portals. For smaller sites, each WorldDirector node may be shared among different websites;
  • Protection against Internet Worms & DDOS by filtering undesired requests to the origin server, protecting cross–site scripting vulnerability and uploading malware to origin servers. This may be especially useful to avoid situations of network congestion and breakdowns such as those created by the internet worms, most types of attacks and similar;
  • Automatic Disaster Recovery for any Web site, multimedia archive or FTP site: any content available via “GET” (including dynamic portals) may be made available from any WorldDirector node when the origin Web site is unavailable;
  • Automatic configuration and de-configuration of each WorldDirector node when servers are down and up again. Any server can be brought down for maintenance, or any network segment can fail without disrupting service until at least one WorldDirector node is reachable. This mechanism is transparent to end-users, applications, and administrators. It does NOT depend on any master/enslaved person and has NO central point of failure characteristics like similar cloud and CDN implementations. It also introduces no latency compared to other masters/enslaved persons or star-centred solutions.
  • Distributed email service: WorldDirector is also very effectively used to provide a redundant, globally distributed corporate email service (based on multiple geographically distributed SMTP & MX servers), with DDOS, antivirus and spam protection that can sustain high traffic peaks and considerable server downtime with uninterrupted service.

Milano Ventures multicloud migration consulting

WorldDirector compared to other cloud and CDN solutions

Although Web accelerators, content caching devices, and multimedia streaming/caching services have recently become available (or claim to be), no similar product or service is currently marketed, including all the features above.

Generally speaking, cloud solutions are delivered by a single data centre location, possibly using redundant hardware, but more often from a single site, network, or AS (Autonomous System), representing a single point of failure. However, WorldDirector provides services from many different ASes, networks, and geographical servers that operate as autonomous nodes in an all-master (not master-slave) configuration. It works effectively and transparently even if some servers or parts of the Internet are down or unreachable.

Similar services offered by competitors may require modification of the Web site content to provide replication. Others sell devices that heavily depend on enslaver/enslaved person or redirection mechanisms, may add latency and operate as a single point of failure, diminishing the whole system’s reliability in case of failures.

WorldDirector is conceived as a turn-key system with full service, and it is 100% transparent to any application. WordlDirector does not require any modification to the origin web server, its pages or any of its applications) and clients (it does not require any additional software or plug-in). Additionally, the reliability of the WorldDirector system has allowed us to maintain a status of 100% always available since 1995 for many clients’ websites and applications, even when one or more servers have been unavailable for hours or days for maintenance or due to faults either in the network, hardware or software.