Anycast for Overlay Networks

To help businesses increase security and control access to their data center and cloud infrastructure, many companies are now offering cloud-based overlay network services. These overlay networks offer global businesses a wide range of benefits without the high cost of building a physically-connected network with dedicated layer 2 transport.

These benefits include:

• Simplified ways to define granular, identity-based policies
• Verification of all access at the packet-level
• Encrypted, high performance connectivity
• Rapid and affordable scalability
• Load balancing and latency reduction
• Cross-cloud connectivity between providers like AWS and Azure

One of the best ways to ensure low-latency connectivity to – and within – an overlay network is to utilize anycast routing. Using just one IP address, remote users around the world can be connected to the overlay network entry point closest to them. Within the overlay network, internal anycast routing minimizes latency from the network edge to datacenter and cloud resources.