The world is changing and has been for quite a few years now. Fueled by the digital transformation, enterprises are looking toward the cloud to meet their ambitions for accelerated application deployment and reduced (or at times eliminated) reliance on traditional on-premises data centers where physical hardware sprawl causes significant operational churn and heavy financial investments.
Public cloud provides elastically scalable infrastructure ubiquitously available around the globe coupled with convenient as-a-service consumption models. Cloud has become a competitive differentiator allowing forward-looking enterprises to take advantage of cloud agility to rapidly launch new software solutions to market at record speeds.
Alkira was founded back in 2018 with a mission to solve the most critical networking and security challenges of this cloud era. Its groundbreaking solution has for the very first time in the industry extended cloud agility to the infrastructure layer offering enterprise-grade feature richness at the speed of cloud and with cloud-like as-a-service consumption models. But it does not end there. Not only does Alkira offer enterprises a consistent and dramatically simplified experience of designing, deploying, and managing networking and security capabilities, but it does so by leveraging the underlying public cloud infrastructure, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform, to power Alkira’s cloud network infrastructure as-a-service (CNaaS) platform.
Today, we are proud to collaborate with AWS in launching the AWS Cloud WAN solution. AWS’s continuous innovation in offering comprehensive solutions to enterprise networking needs connecting AWS workloads across single-region and multi-region deployments works in perfect harmony with Alkira’s CNaaS platform.
The joint solution provides control plane and data plane integration between the AWS Cloud WAN edge locations and the Alkira Cloud Exchange Points (Alkira CXPs) around the world. Alkira Cloud Exchange Points are globally distributed virtual points of presence with elastic scale, advanced networking controls, and symmetric service insertion capabilities. The cloud-native virtual cross-connects between the AWS Cloud WAN edge locations and the Alkira CXPs are optimally provisioned for a very high throughput, lowest latency, and high resiliency between the two environments. Both environments make use of BGP dynamic routing protocol to bi-directionally exchange reachability information and allow cloud and on-premises resources connected to either of the environments to communicate with each other.
Alkira Cloud Services Exchange seamlessly connects enterprise multi-cloud environments. AWS cloud workloads connected to the Global WAN edge locations can communicate with any on-premises locations and multi-cloud workloads connected to the Alkira Cloud Services Exchange. The automated nature of cross-connect provisioning greatly simplifies extension of AWS Cloud WAN to accommodate multi-cloud environments.
Alkira’s intelligent service insertion capabilities allow joint customers to insert network and security services, for example the next-generation firewalls of choice, from the Alkira network services marketplace into the application traffic between the AWS Cloud WAN and Alkira Cloud Services Exchange environments. Such deployments are done in a consistent manner across a single cloud and multi-cloud environments with a uniform set of capabilities.
In case of the next-generation firewalls, they are automatically provisioned through the Alkira portal into the Alkira Cloud Exchange Points (Alkira CXPs) where the virtual cross-connect between the two environments occurs. Not only does Alkira’s solution provide simplified and consistent design, deployment, and integration of the network services, but it also offers a full life-cycle management, freeing the IT teams from the tedious manual processes.
Alkira intent-based policies allow administrators the flexibility to select the application traffic to be symmetrically steered toward the next-generation firewalls. As the need for application traffic between the two environments varies over time, Alkira’s solution will auto-scale up and down the firewall capacity based on a real-time demand.
AWS and Alkira continue to innovate and collaborate bringing new joint solutions to market and to provide an adequate response to the most pressing enterprise needs in the cloud era.
See how you can bring up your AWS network across cloud and on-premises environments in less than 7 minutes https://youtu.be/gCBgX6V4V4ATake
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David Klebanov
