By Atif Khan
Dec 2, 2020
Most organizations are eager to accelerate their migration to the cloud, recognizing it as an opportunity to improve their agility, shift towards consumption-based pricing for IT services, reduce CAPEX and accelerate the deployment of new services and applications.
Unfortunately, many enterprises struggle to realize these benefits as smoothly or rapidly as they would hope to. Among the biggest reasons for this is legacy network infrastructure that has not kept pace with the evolution of the cloud over the past few, short years.
At Alkira, we have resolved this challenge – using next-generation networking innovation and our experience with pioneering SD-WAN – putting enterprises back at the heart of the network with transparent, total control over worldwide IT operations, wherever they are in the cloud.
We launched our Network Cloud in April of 2020. Network Cloud offers a global unified multi-cloud network with integrated network and security services. Today, we are announcing the expansion of our Network Cloud with the addition of Cloud Backbone as-a-Service. With CBaaS, enterprises can build a global high speed low latency backbone within minutes.
What enterprises are really looking for
SD-WAN continues to revolutionize the way enterprises do business. When I helped my brother Amir Khan found Viptela in 2012 (since acquired by Cisco), we understood the challenges presented to enterprises using MPLS, and that SD-WAN was the future. It still is.
But now, at Alkira, we know that the onward evolution and pathway to cloud networking is to eliminate complexity, reduce cost, and energize businesses with the flexibility and immediacy they always expected from the cloud, but were unable to totally achieve with SD-WAN.
At Alkira, we focused on innovating a way to rapidly provision and build cloud networking in a fully secure environment from anywhere-to-anywhere. And to deliver that as a service, with no requirement for enterprises to build any of their own network infrastructure. Turn it on, and it’s yours to operate without needing to buy and own it.
Simply point, click, build and provision cloud networking from a simple UI within minutes or hours rather than months or even years. Dispense with the need to purchase and connect infrastructure. Instead, have it all at your fingertips as a service, with none of the complexity and all of the simplicity enterprises really need; finally taking full advantage of the economics and flexibility of the cloud.
Today, we’re announcing that Alkira has developed the industry’s first Cloud Backbone-as-a-Service (CBaaS), an expansion of our Network Cloud – on-demand Cloud Network-as-a-Service (CNaaS) that extends cloud connectivity to any network from any network.
Our new service provides high-bandwidth, low-latency layer 3 site-to-site, elastic connectivity that enables your business to connect core data centers to the edge, or remote sites worldwide, and to any hybrid multi-cloud—within moments.
CBaaS: Alkira’s world-first, world-class cloud backbone service
Available worldwide, CBaaS lets you expand the backbone with a few clicks on a self-service portal. It’s a true as-a-service offering with no hardware to manage or software to download, enabling organizations to provision at velocity, high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity with exacting service levels and at a fraction of the cost of building your own network.
It includes advanced routing controls, end-to-end segmentation, built-in path redundancy, and integrated firewall security, further easing complexity in your WAN environment. Moreover, it can scale to tens of thousands of routes for each customer and offers unified policy control and end-to-end visibility.
These are all qualities that make Alkira CBaaS uniquely suited to addressing the cloud era’s networking challenges. Imagine, for example, the power of rapidly extending more of your on-site infrastructure into the cloud and integrating it with your multi-cloud environment, with end-to-end governance and visibility.
Another powerful use case might follow the merger of two organizations with vastly different networking environments. In such a case, Alkira CBaaS enables you to stitch regionalized SD-WAN islands from the same vendor or different SD-WAN vendors into a single fabric.
The future of the WAN is here
The future of cloud networking as-a-service has arrived with CBaaS. Please read a Network Cloud blog by our CEO Amir Khan and a press release for more detail about how Alkira’s CBaaS provides a simple, unified, and consistent way to design and deploy secure, integrated enterprise-class network capabilities.
Welcome to the future of cloud networking, today!
