Alkira, a network cloud pioneer, has announced the expansion of its on-demand Cloud Network-as-a-Service (CNaaS) to extend cloud connectivity to any network. The industry’s first Cloud Backbone-as-a-Service (CBaaS) connects core data centres to edge or remote sites worldwide and to any multi-cloud, in minutes and hours compared to six to 18 months.
The Alkira Cloud Services Exchange (CSX) CBaaS is a global high-speed, low-latency backbone that interconnects users, sites and clouds with segmentation. Customers can expand backbone network capacity as needed for every site on-demand, while reducing costs by avoiding legacy hardware builds and extensive training. As part of Alkira’s Network Cloud, the CBaaS also includes integrated network and security services and end-to-end visibility, control and governance.
“The network is the enterprise laggard requiring tedious, inflexible and costly DIY builds that can take months and even years to deploy,” said Amir Khan, CEO and Founder of Alkira. “Alkira’s Network Cloud provides a new way to design and deploy a unified, consistent way to deliver secure, integrated enterprise-class network capabilities as simple and powerful to use as a smartphone app. The future of the network is as-a-Service, and today our robust and agile network cloud now extends to the cloud backbone, on-premises and branch networks.”
“The Alkira CBaaS is the first highly available, high-bandwidth, low-latency Layer 3 backbone which can be built globally in minutes, with integrated network and security services. Our CBaaS supports full segmentation capabilities, comprehensive routing controls, built in path redundancy, multihoming support and loop avoidance,” said Atif Khan, CTO and Founder of Alkira. “It scales to tens of thousands of routes for each customer and provides troubleshooting and monitoring tools for day 2 operations.”
The Alkira CSX routed Cloud Backbone-as-a-Service:
- Connects on-premises sites (branches and data centres), remote users Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) and clouds (hybrid and multi-cloud).
- Connects regionalised SD-WAN islands from the same vendor or different SD-WAN vendors.
- Includes advanced routing controls, end-to-end segmentation and built in path redundancy.
- Integrates next generation firewall security with elastic auto-scaling based on real-time application demand.
“As workloads have become increasingly distributed across a multi-cloud landscape and application users have become even more dispersed, network infrastructure must be modernised, architecturally and operationally, to fully address the needs of the cloud era. The challenge is inherently complex, but solutions must emphasise simplicity,” said Brad Casemore, Research VP, Datacentre and Multi-cloud Networks at IDC. “With the introduction of CBaaS, Alkira has sought to make it possible for cloud architects and network operators to mitigate the complexity and lower the cost of connecting users, sites, data centres and clouds.”
The Alkira Network Cloud eliminates network infrastructure by enabling enterprises to easily deploy a cloud service with drag-and-drop simplicity. Customers can create and provision fully secure networks in any region worldwide and integrate security through the Alkira CSX marketplace, enabling enterprise connectivity from any on-premises site, including core and edge data centres, to any hybrid, public or multi-cloud in a few clicks.
