Hubs

Forget hub and spoke#

You still have hub locations, even if you no longer have a traditional hub and spoke network.

Your hubs are where you store data, or host applications. They are also where you hand off to other networks, or host security functions.

It's important to document your network, so that you understand where your apps and users are, and what the traffic flows are and where the bottlenecks might be so that you create the right hypernets to match your organisation.

Roles#

Hubs can have multiple Roles. They tend to be about hosting, transit or security.

Example: You might have a head office location that you host apps and data storage, but have central firewalls in a datacentre. Your head office would have the Hub Roles App, Storage and the datacentre would have the roles Security, Internet Transit. transit hubs

Transit roles include Internet, Cloud, Site to Site, Interconnect etc. You also want to record and consider the type of connection employed. A cloud connection could be anything from a self configured IPSec VPN through to a dedicated interconnect such as Microsoft ExpressRoute for Azure.

Redundancy#

It's also likely you have or want redundancy in your network, (where one Hub is Primary and another is Secondary) therefore assigning a redundancy level along with a Type will be useful.

Not all redundancy is equal. Maybe you have backups in a second location, but no automatic recovery. You could have Active/Passive cloud connections across multiple datacentres, or full load balancing between firewalls.

There are many combinations of configurations.

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Have a fairly complex VT here with a collection of HUBs illustrated ??