By David Klebanov
Head of Product Marketing, Alkira

In the beginning…

Those of us who had been around the IT industry for a while had witnessed the journey from the hardware-based infrastructure in 1990s and the early 2000s, to the infrastructure virtualization that followed in the 2000s and 2010s, and eventually onto the mainstream cloud adoption we are seeing today. Cloud changed the way Enterprises view infrastructure. It is the journey from do-it-yourself to as-a-service, which transformed the infrastructure landscape and unlocked never-before-seen levels of time-to-service agility.

While compute, storage and applications have evolved to take advantage of the cloud era as-a-service approach, the network has unfortunately not. The networks of today are many times costly to procure, slow to deploy and complex to operate. The situation is even more dire for the cloud networking, which changes the traditional networking paradigm. Enterprise network teams encounter further challenges around lack of cloud expertise, restrictive limits and lack of advanced network controls. The do-it-yourself approach to cloud networking inhibits business agility.

Alkira Reinvents Networking for the Cloud Era

Alkira® comes to the rescue. Alkira Network Cloud is industry’s first solution offering global unified network infrastructure as-a-service. With Alkira, enterprises can have a consistent and significantly simplified experience for end-to-end and any-to-any network connectivity across users, sites, and clouds with integrated network and security services, full day-2 operational visibility, advanced controls, and governance. The entire network is drawn on an intuitive design canvas, deployed in a single click and is ready in minutes! There is no hardware to buy and no software to download.

The Alkira Cloud Services Exchange™ (Alkira CSX) serves as a foundation for Alkira Network Cloud. It consists of a highly available and resilient network of globally interconnected Alkira Cloud Exchange Points (Alkira CXPs), virtual multi-cloud points of presence with a full routing stack and network services capabilities, and an Alkira CSX Portal. Users, sites, data centers, regional SD-WAN fabrics, colocations, public clouds, network and security services, and SaaS/Internet exit points connect to the Alkira global cloud backbone through the geographically closest Alkira Cloud Exchange Point™. Integrated stateful security services coupled with an end-to-end segmentation capabilities and intent-based policies offered by the Alkira CSX, allow enterprises to consistently secure on-premise, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The Alkira Cloud Services Exchange Portal offers a modern graphical interface for all design, provisioning, and day-2 operational needs.

Alkira + AWS

Today, we are proud to collaborate with AWS in launching AWS Transit Gateway (TGW) Connect functionality. AWS’s continuous innovation works in perfect harmony with Alkira Network Cloud. We seamlessly leverage new AWS cloud-native capabilities to deliver exceptional value to our customers with dramatically simplified as-a-service approach for on-premise, cloud and multi-cloud networking environments. With AWS TGW Connect data plane, control plane management plane and API integration into Alkira Network Cloud, our customers can enjoy high speed low latency segmented network connectivity from AWS workload VPCs into their global multi-region cloud network delivered as-a-service by Alkira. At the same time, we continue offering our customers an as-a-service choice of flexible last-mile access technologies, such as AWS Direct Connect, standards-based IPsec, SD-WAN and SSL VPN, to connect their on-premise environments to the AWS cloud workloads.

This comprehensive approach bridges the gap between the cloud and on-premise environments, delivering our joint customers a high-speed cloud network and security leveraging the Alkira Network Cloud as-a-service solution.

For more details, please reach out to us and schedule a demo using the link the below
https://www.alkira.com/demo/