Cloud connectivity is the network layer that moves your data between a cloud, the internet, other clouds and your own systems. It decides how fast your data travels, what it costs to move it out, and whose infrastructure it crosses on the way.
What is cloud connectivity?
Cloud connectivity is the set of networks and links that move data between a cloud's infrastructure and the outside world — the public internet, other clouds and on-premises systems — and between resources inside the cloud itself.
It is the provider's network underneath your virtual machines, storage and clusters: the routes, bandwidth and exchange points that decide how fast, how reliably and by what path your data travels.
In practice it covers five things:
- Public internet access — your instances and storage reachable from anywhere, and able to reach out.
- Private links — connections between your environments that never touch the open internet.
- Bandwidth matched to your data — enough capacity to move terabytes.
- Low-latency routing — a point of presence close to your users, and short paths to the networks.
- Redundancy — more than one route to everywhere, so a failed link doesn’t cause an outage.
Good connectivity is the layer you never think about. You only notice it when it fails to deliver with expected speed.
What are the types of cloud connectivity?
- Public connectivity — resources reachable over the open internet, via public IPs and the provider's transit and peering.
- Private or dedicated connectivity — isolated links between a customer and the cloud that do not traverse the public internet.
- VPC or isolated networking — a segmented private network inside the cloud, where your resources talk to each other without being exposed.
- Hybrid connectivity — a link between cloud resources and an on-premises data centre or a private cloud.
- Multicloud or cloud-to-cloud connectivity — links between clouds, regions and locations, so data moves between environments without traveling through the internet.
Most deployments use several of these at once.
Cloud connectivity vs. traditional networking
The difference is who operates the network. Traditional enterprise networking is hardware you buy, rack, wire and manage, with capacity you commit to in advance — cloud connectivity is delivered as part of the service, with the provider running the routing, the peering and the exchange-point relationships, and capacity that grows with your usage instead of with your purchase orders.
What is the role of connectivity in cloud computing?
Compute and storage need pathways on which data can travel. Connectivity is what makes a cloud usable at scale:
- It removes the bottleneck: on a single-path or under-provisioned network, transfer time, not processing time, sets how long a job takes.
- It keeps workloads reachable when something breaks, through redundant paths and dynamic routing that move traffic off a failed link without anyone intervening.
- It puts a point of presence close to the people and systems using the cloud, which is most of what latency actually is.
- It provides bandwidth that scales with data volumes rather than capping them.
For regulated and data-heavy organisations it decides where traffic flows. Which jurisdictions your data crosses is increasingly asked about as sharply as where it sits.
Where and how is connectivity used in the cloud?
- Public access and multicloud — resources published to the internet, plus fast communication between clouds, regions and locations run by the same provider, without leaving that provider's network.
- Hybrid and on-premises integration — linking an existing data centre or private cloud to cloud resources over dedicated, isolated links, so both behave as one environment.
- Data-intensive pipelines — Earth observation, AI training and scientific computing move dozens of petabytes in and out of compute. In these workloads bandwidth, not compute, is usually the constraint, and the network is the part of the platform that decides whether the work is feasible at all.
- Research network access — universities and institutes reaching cloud resources over academic networks such as GÉANT.
Key cloud connectivity concepts
- Bandwidth and throughput — how much data the link can carry, and how much you get end to end.
- Latency — round-trip delay, driven mostly by distance and the number of networks in the path; a nearby point of presence is the main lever.
- Data egress — traffic leaving the cloud. With hyperscalers it is typically metered per gigabyte, which makes it both a running cost (and a reason that moving data out later is expensive enough to keep you where you are).
- Peering and internet exchange points (IXPs) — where networks interconnect directly instead of paying a third party to carry traffic between them; more peering means shorter, cheaper, more predictable paths.
- Redundancy and dynamic routing — duplicate links and protocols that re-route traffic automatically when one path fails.
- Network isolation — keeping public traffic, customer traffic and management traffic apart, so a problem in one does not reach the others.
Public internet vs. private connectivity
Public internet connectivity means your cloud resources are reachable over the open internet: universal, flexible and available immediately. The trade-off is shared infrastructure — performance depends on the quality of the provider's transit and peering, and exposure is yours to manage with firewalls and access rules.
Private connectivity means dedicated or isolated links — cloud-to-cloud, hybrid, or a direct connection into the provider's network — that do not traverse the public internet. Traffic is more predictable, less exposed and usually faster for sustained transfers, in exchange for a connection that has to be arranged.
Public suits general access, distributed users and anything that has to be reachable from everywhere. Private suits regulated data, hybrid architectures and heavy, predictable flows between fixed endpoints. Most organisations end up using both, for different traffic.
How does CloudFerro's cloud connectivity work?
CloudFerro runs its own network connecting all of its data centres. That means free communication between its clouds and locations, redundancy that does not depend on the public internet, and a point of presence close to the user.
- Broad reach — connections with hundreds of internet service providers, through internet exchange points such as PLIX, DE-CIX and ACX, dedicated links to large providers, direct cloud-to-cloud links, and academic networks.
- Physical network isolation — the public network, private clouds, customer networks and infrastructure management run on physically separated infrastructure, which limits attack surface and keeps a failure in one from reaching another.
- Full redundancy — every element of the network is redundant, with multiple routes from each ISP, dynamic routing between them, and no single central point the whole network depends on.
- Bandwidth matched to the data — capacity is sized against the dozens of petabytes held on the platform and expanded as that grows, with continuous monitoring of network capacity rather than a per-customer meter.
- Direct GÉANT connection — a direct link to the GÉANT research network, so universities, institutes and research centres reach CloudFerro over the academic backbone they already use.
How is CloudFerro's network organised?
The cloud is organised with three scopes:
- Project network — the network inside your own projects, within a single cloud region.
- Region network — the network of a whole cloud region, connecting projects and services in it.
- CloudFerro network — the backbone that binds every region into one whole, and carries traffic between them without going out to the public internet.
Fair usage. Outbound transfer that comes out of real work on the platform — your own compute, storage and processing — is expected, and is what the network is built for. The fair usage policy exists for the other case: sustained egress with no compute or storage behind it, such as content delivery, mirroring, tunnelling or reselling connectivity.
Why choose CloudFerro for connectivity?
- Connectivity that is effectively free. Around 99% of CloudFerro clients never pay anything for connectivity. Egress is effectively free under fair use, with no retroactive charges and no bill that arrives after the fact because a workload got busy — a different economics from metered per-gigabyte egress, where the cost of leaving is part of the product design.
- Small enough to arrange things. A specific customer need for a dedicated link, a hybrid setup or a specific route can always be arranged to the requirement rather than to a product catalogue.
- Sovereign at the network layer. The network is EU-owned and EU-operated, on infrastructure CloudFerro owns. Data does not only rest in Europe — it travels on European-governed infrastructure.
- Reliable and isolated by design. Full redundancy with no single central point of failure, and physical separation of public, private, customer and management traffic. CloudFerro's operations are certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and attested under BSI C5.
- A network built for European science and government. CloudFerro works directly with European research institutions and public-sector bodies, and the network is shaped around them, including a direct line to the GÉANT research backbone. For Earth observation, HPC and scientific workloads — and for public institutions in Poland and across Europe — that is a practical advantage, not a positioning statement.
How is this different from hyperscaler connectivity?
Hyperscalers are simply bigger. The differences that matter are cost, jurisdiction and flexibility. Connectivity that is effectively free under fair use rather than metered egress that grows with your success. A network owned and operated in the EU, rather than foreign-jurisdiction infrastructure presented under a sovereign-region label. Finally, CloudFerro is small enough to set up a non-standard connection.
Frequently asked questions
Not sure which connection you need?
Public internet access comes with the cloud. Dedicated links, hybrid setups and connections to your own data centre are arranged case by case.