NIaaS Fundamentals
NIaaS delivers networking capabilities, such as cloud connectivity, routing, segmentation, firewalls, and traffic management, as an on-demand service. Organizations configure and consume the network through software instead of purchasing and maintaining extensive physical infrastructure.
Traditional networks require organizations to acquire hardware, provision circuits, manage appliances, and periodically refresh equipment. NIaaS uses software-defined infrastructure, centralized orchestration, and automation to provision or modify networks much faster. It generally shifts spending from upfront capital expenditure to subscription or consumption-based operating expenditure.
Common benefits include:
- Faster network provisioning
- Easier scaling across regions and clouds
- Centralized visibility and policy management
- Reduced hardware and operational complexity
- Consumption-aligned costs
- More consistent multicloud connectivity
NIaaS can be particularly useful for enterprises connecting multiple clouds, data centers, branches, partners, and remote users.
Modern platforms can integrate firewalls, microsegmentation, encryption, identity-aware access, and Zero Trust controls into the network. Policies can be applied consistently across environments, but customers should still assess shared-responsibility boundaries, data handling, certifications, logging, and regulatory requirements.
Key considerations include:
- Supported clouds, regions, sites, and security vendors
- Performance guarantees, redundancy, and SLAs
- Pricing and data-transfer charges
- Integration with existing networks and automation tools
- Security and compliance capabilities
- Migration complexity and vendor lock-in
- Quality of monitoring, troubleshooting, and support
A NIaaS platform provides global connectivity, network segmentation, routing policy, security service insertion, and observability through a unified control plane. Enterprises define their desired network topology, policy, and security posture through a portal or API, and the platform handles provisioning, orchestration, and operations beneath the surface.
Building cloud networking manually, configuring transit gateways, VPC peering, route tables, and security groups across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI, is operationally intensive, error-prone, and expensive to maintain. NIaaS replaces this with a single abstraction layer that works consistently across all cloud providers, managed by the platform rather than your engineering team.
Alkira delivers NIaaS through Cloud Exchange Points (CXPs) deployed worldwide, connecting users, sites, and clouds while integrating SD-WAN, firewalls, and SASE into the same fabric. There's no hardware to rack and no software to install: networking is provisioned in minutes with built-in security, and managed end to end through a centralized portal that gives teams full operational control and visibility.
Multicloud & Hybrid Cloud Networking
Multicloud networking connects applications and workloads across two or more public cloud providers, such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and OCI, through a unified architecture with consistent routing, security, and visibility across all environments.
Hybrid cloud networking connects public cloud environments with private infrastructure, data centers, branch locations, and colocation facilities, enabling consistent policies and visibility across both cloud and on-premises environments.
Multicloud networking connects multiple public cloud providers. Hybrid cloud networking connects cloud environments with on-premises infrastructure. Most enterprises need both at once, which is why multicloud and hybrid connectivity are increasingly treated as a single architecture rather than two separate problems.
Centralizing firewall policy, zero trust controls, and traffic inspection across cloud environments, rather than configuring security separately in each cloud, helps enforce consistent rules and close gaps between environments. Multicloud networking platforms typically do this by inserting security controls directly into traffic flows from a single control plane, regardless of which cloud a workload runs in.
Most enterprise multicloud platforms support the major hyperscalers, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and aim for a consistent operational experience across all of them so teams don't need to build deep native expertise in each cloud's own networking constructs. Alkira, for example, supports all four with an identical workflow in each, plus on-premises data centers.
Modern multicloud networking platforms can provision global connectivity in minutes to hours rather than the weeks or months required for manual, per-cloud configuration. Nemertes research based on interviews with 13 Alkira enterprise customers found that deploying a new cloud environment with Alkira takes less than one business day on average, compared to 26 days before adopting the platform, a 96% reduction in calendar time.
Source: Nemertes 2024 Alkira Real Economic Value Report
Global Backbone & WAN Modernization
Global Backbone-as-a-Service is a cloud-native model for delivering enterprise WAN connectivity, provisioned on demand without physical circuits or hardware. Providers typically operate a network of interconnection points across major cloud regions, connecting cloud regions, data centers, branches, and users through a single programmable network with consistent routing, segmentation, and security, consumed like any other cloud service.
A cloud-native backbone aims to deliver comparable performance, consistent routing, traffic prioritization, and global reach through software rather than physical circuits, generally at a lower cost. Instead of provisioning circuits with months of lead time, connectivity can typically be deployed in minutes to hours, and legacy circuits can be migrated incrementally, running in parallel with the new backbone until the transition is complete.
The primary benefits are speed, cost, and simplicity: organizations can provision global connectivity in minutes to hours rather than months, typically at consumption-based pricing rather than fixed circuit rates. A cloud-delivered backbone can also unify cloud, WAN, and SD-WAN connectivity under a single management plane, reducing the fragmented tooling and per-provider configuration that legacy WAN architectures require.
Cloud-native backbones typically deploy points of presence natively within major cloud providers, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and OCI, and interconnect them so cloud-to-cloud, cloud-to-data-center, and cloud-to-branch traffic flows through one managed network with consistent policy enforcement, instead of through separate peering arrangements or VPN tunnels for every cloud pair.
In most architectures, yes. A cloud-native backbone is generally designed to complement rather than replace existing SD-WAN investments: branch SD-WAN fabric connects into the backbone, extending its reach into cloud regions without re-deploying branch hardware or switching SD-WAN vendors.
Segmentation context is carried through the backbone itself, preserving isolation between business units, compliance domains, or security zones across every connected region. Policy is typically defined once in a central control plane and enforced consistently across all cloud regions, data centers, and branches, without needing per-region configuration.
A Cloud Exchange Point (CXP) is the term Alkira uses for the fully managed, cloud-native network nodes that form its global backbone. Each CXP acts as a regional aggregation point for connected clouds, sites, and users, handling routing, segmentation, and security enforcement at every interconnection point without customers managing the underlying infrastructure. Other providers describe similar concepts under different names, such as points of presence or exchange fabrics.
Most cloud-native backbones support phased migration: the new backbone runs in parallel with existing MPLS circuits, and traffic moves over gradually by site, region, or workload rather than through a single cutover. This reduces migration risk and lets teams demonstrate value early, before decommissioning legacy circuits.
Integrated Security & Network Services
It means firewall management, SASE integration, load balancing, and advanced IP services such as DNS, DHCP, and IPAM are delivered as policy-driven network services from the same platform that handles connectivity and routing, rather than as separate products each requiring their own deployment and management. The aim is to reduce the complexity, cost, and operational overhead of running network and security as disconnected systems.
A single control plane for connectivity, security policy, routing, and IP services across cloud and on-premises environments removes much of the coordination overhead between network and security teams. It also replaces per-cloud manual configuration with consistent policy templates, and supports automation through APIs and infrastructure-as-code integrations.
Generally no. Vendor-agnostic platforms are designed to insert your existing firewall, SASE, or DDI vendor, rather than replace it. Alkira, for example, integrates directly with vendors including Palo Alto Networks, Check Point, Fortinet, Cisco, and Infoblox, handling service insertion, high availability, and symmetric routing automatically. In practice, this often means needing fewer appliances overall: Nemertes found that enterprises using Alkira reduced their firewall count by 73% on average, not because security was weakened, but because centralized policy enforcement and consistent segmentation eliminated the need for redundant appliances at every cloud boundary.
Source: Nemertes 2024 Alkira Real Economic Value Report
Consolidation savings usually come from three places: fewer appliances to license and maintain, less staff time spent on redundant configuration across clouds, and faster rollout of new security policies. Organizations often see cost and time savings compound as more environments are brought under the unified platform, rather than as a single one-time reduction.
Automated health monitoring, automatic failover, and symmetric routing are used to keep traffic properly inspected and prevent a firewall failure from becoming a connectivity outage. This removes the need to manually configure HA pairs and monitor firewall health separately in each cloud environment.
Load balancing is the dynamic redistribution of network traffic across environments and points of presence to improve performance and application resilience. In a NIaaS architecture, this is typically handled in software at the network layer, so organizations get the benefits of load balancing without deploying dedicated load balancer appliances at every location. Alkira, for instance, calls its version of this a PoP Attraction Balancing Connection (PABC).
Some NIaaS platforms integrate with existing DDI tools to provide unified DNS, DHCP, and IP address management across cloud and on-premises environments, replacing per-provider DNS configuration and fragmented IPAM tools with centralized visibility. This can reduce IP conflicts and simplify compliance reporting.
SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) converges networking and security into a cloud-delivered service, generally with a focus on user-to-application access. A NIaaS platform typically complements SASE architectures by providing the underlying network fabric into which SASE capabilities are inserted, rather than replacing an existing SASE investment.
Business Partner & Extranet Connectivity
It refers to onboarding business partners, suppliers, and acquired networks through a repeatable, governed control plane rather than manual, one-off configuration. A cloud-native overlay applies segmentation and access policy automatically, so each partner or third party gets access only to the applications and resources they need. Alkira and Lumen jointly market this capability as Instant Extranet.
A traditional extranet or site-to-site VPN is typically built one tunnel, one firewall rule, and often one piece of hardware at a time. Governed, cloud-delivered extranet models replace that with automated provisioning: each partner or acquired entity lands in its own isolated segment, and explicit, least-privilege policy exposes only the shared applications. SD-WAN, by comparison, optimizes branch WAN transport for a single organization; extranet-focused platforms are purpose-built for connecting external parties, with policy designed around limited, defined trust rather than full internal access.
Nemertes found that enterprises using Alkira reduced the calendar time to onboard a new extranet partner by 91% on average, from more than 91 days (three months) to 8 days. Staff time dropped 98%, from nearly 260 hours to under 5. For mergers and acquisitions, customers reported similar results: one financial telecoms company reduced network merger time from 80–120 days to 3 days by connecting acquired infrastructure to Alkira Cloud Exchange Points via IPsec.
Source: Nemertes 2024 Alkira Real Economic Value Report
Yes, this is a common capability. Advanced NAT policies and connector groups can be applied automatically to resolve overlapping and conflicting IP address ranges across business partners, so duplicate address space isn't a blocker to onboarding.
Yes. During M&A, network segments can be connected on a defined timeline, giving both organizations controlled, isolated access without extending full trust between networks on day one, then expanded or unwound as integration decisions are finalized.
Not necessarily. Partners commonly connect through an IPsec connector over their own broadband, or over a provider's dedicated internet-on-demand service for SLA-backed performance, so there's nothing to provision at the partner site. Production and data-center traffic can instead ride a private, SLA-backed underlay rather than best-effort links, keeping performance-sensitive traffic deterministic end to end.
Colocation Simplification
It is the modernization of network functions traditionally hosted in a colo, such as routing, cloud connectivity, security, and traffic aggregation, using cloud-native, software-defined services. The goal is to reduce physical dependencies while preserving performance, security, and control.
No, in most cases. Colocation modernization platforms are generally underlay-agnostic: organizations can retain existing connectivity, choose providers by location or workload, or pair the platform with a specific carrier for a more tightly integrated, SLA-backed option. Alkira, for example, can run over any compatible underlay, and is also offered paired with Lumen's infrastructure for organizations that want a single, AI-ready underlay beneath the same control plane.
Yes, typically. Existing colocation facilities can remain connected during the transition, and network segments can isolate migration, validation, and production traffic so teams can change routes and policy in controlled stages before retiring infrastructure.
Cloud-native network nodes take over routing, segmentation, policy enforcement, traffic steering, and service insertion, capabilities that would otherwise run on dedicated colo-hosted appliances. These functions are centrally managed and delivered as a service, which reduces dedicated appliance sprawl.
They generally don't need to be replaced up front. Sites, SD-WAN fabrics, data centers, clouds, and legacy colo hubs can typically attach to the new fabric individually, supporting coexistence and a phased modernization rather than a single cutover.
Alkira customers have used its Cloud Exchange Points to retire colo-hosted routing and firewall hardware while keeping the facility itself connected during transition, then decommissioned the colo entirely once traffic was fully migrated, changing routes and policy in stages rather than in one cutover.
