Q&A with Atif Khan, Co-Founder and CTO of Alkira
Atif Khan is a renowned routing expert with extensive experience bringing ground-breaking networking solutions to market and architecting the world’s largest and most sophisticated global networks. As CTO and co-founder, Atif is responsible for Alkira’s technology vision and overall engineering and product development.
Prior to Alkira, Atif was a VP Technology and Solutions, and a founding member at Viptela, the SD-WAN pioneer acquired by Cisco in 2017. Atif received a BS in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and he holds 7 patents in routing, security and overlay multicast.
What made you decide to start Alkira?
The AI and cloud era demands a unified, flexible approach to networking. We reimagined the network as a true as-a-service service—global, elastic, and AI-ready. Alkira delivers fully managed network infrastructure with security, visibility, and governance built in, so enterprises can scale and adapt as fast as their AI strategy evolves.
My team and I have spent decades building large-scale networks and pioneering cloud networking technologies like SD-WAN. The throughline: abstract complexity, automate operations, and make networking as easy to consume as any other cloud resource. Alkira applies those lessons in a clean-sheet, natively cloud-delivered design—entirely hardware-free.
What we have built is on-demand network infrastructure that can instantly connect AI data centers, clouds, remote users, and edge sites with secure connectivity to AI workloads, all from a single interface. Our Cloud Services Exchange (CSX) behaves like the cloud itself—elastic and instantly available—so customers can provision or decommission in minutes, not months. Advanced network and security services—NAT, DNS/DHCP/IPAM, and integrated third-party controls—are one click away, making insertion and policy management simple and consistent everywhere.
