I was talking recently with an engineer from a company that struggles with an increasingly common problem: the need for a better network backbone. They aren’t a huge company but their network has become fairly complex.
You can probably relate to this. The company is based in the U.S. and has several sites around North America – some large and some as small as a single remote user. They also need to reach a few sites of their own and some partner sites in Europe, Asia, and South America. Plus SaaS applications along with some data and applications in various clouds. These are all connected with a mixture of MPLS, SD-WAN, and IPsec tunnels. As you can imagine, their WAN has become difficult to troubleshoot and manage.
This complex mixture of connections and technologies works well enough and could have limped along for several more years, except for two recent developments. One is a company initiative to train and use their own customized AI model, and the other is a desire to connect to a partner in China. The introduction of AI meant that they need to pull data from all the various sites where it was located for training, and then to continue to pull data quickly to continuously update the models. Since the analytics and automated processes provided by the AI will be an integral part of the business, it’s critical that users worldwide are able to reach the data centers with those servers. They need a reliable, highly available, secure, low-latency backbone and the current solution wasn’t reliable or fast enough. The connection to a Chinese partner company was an additional challenge, due to a combination of technical, regulatory, security, and geopolitical issues.
The solution I suggested was from a company you may not be familiar with: Alkira Inc. Alkira provides a global, fully managed, high-performance Layer 3 backbone-as-a-service. It was founded in 2018 by the folks who created Viptela SD-WAN, Amir and Atif Khan, so you know they know they are experts on virtual WANs.
Alkira’s concept leverages the resources and connections already existing in hyperscale cloud providers. It stitches them together to provide an encrypted, full-mesh WAN backbone to connect your physical sites, users, clouds, and SaaS endpoints. Companies connect their network endpoints to the closest Alkira Cloud Exchange Point (CXP), which are regional cloud-hosted Points of Presence (POPs). You can use pretty much any WAN technology to connect – IPsec tunnels, SD-WAN fabric, MPLS, and direct connects such as AWS DX or Azure ER.
The CXPs then build full-mesh connectivity with the other CXPs associated with that customer to provide a secure, encrypted backbone for their network. Policy-based segmentation is used to isolate each customer’s traffic, which also allows controlled inter-segment access such as for a partner site. Alkira’s platform enforces intent-based, application-aware security policies and micro-segmentation. Once traffic is on the backbone, it is routed to the CXP nearest the destination endpoint or SaaS application, or the Internet. This gives users fast access to the resources they need without having to backhaul to a central data center.
Alkira currently has POPs located in more than 80 regions throughout the world, including China. Since endpoints connect to the nearest regional POP, this saves circuit costs while providing fast, low-latency interconnections between sites. It can reduce or eliminate equipment and provisioning costs, along with colocation costs. Alkira estimates about a 40-60% average cost saving over traditional WAN technologies.
Another of the benefits of Alkira’s solution is fast deployment. This is something that may become important to my engineer friend in the future, as they are in talks to purchase another company. I have been involved in designing the merger of two company networks with completely different philosophies and topologies. It’s not easy. With Alkira, you can connect the new company’s existing WAN into Alkira’s backbone, getting the connectivity needed quickly – segmented as appropriate. Then you can migrate their network at your own pace. Planning and deployment are controlled via an online portal, using a graphical drag-and-drop interface accessed from your browser. Administrators use the portal to define segments, policies, and routing, and the backend then dynamically provisions the required connectivity and security. Monitoring and management of your company’s backbone is also done via this portal. One of the biggest delays in rolling out network changes is the time it takes to configure and test equipment. This self-service model solves that.
In summary, Alkira offers a fast, secure, scalable, on-demand and cost-efficient WAN backbone with global reach that is easy to manage and control. I felt that it ticks the boxes for my friend’s company; perhaps it would for yours too.
