Alkira + Google Cloud Platform:
Network Infrastructure-as-a-Service for Hyperscale Networking
Accelerate Google Cloud Platform Adoption with Alkira Network Infrastructure On-Demand
Overview
The Alkira Platform revolutionizes enterprise cloud networking by unlocking the potential of hyperscale infrastructure. By leveraging Google Cloud Platform’s vast network backbone, organizations can dramatically rethink how they build and operate networks, achieving unprecedented performance gains, rapid provisioning capabilities, and drastically improved total cost of ownership models. This joint solution bridges the gap between the promise of hyperscale networking and the feature demands of enterprise networking.
The Challenge
While cloud computing has enabled organizations to rapidly deploy servers, storage, and applications at global scale, the latent potential in hyperscale networks has remained largely inaccessible for traditional enterprise networking use cases. Cloud providers have invested heavily in network infrastructure that rivals the world’s largest telecommunications providers in terms of capacity, global reach, and resiliency. However, existing DIY options for building on top of these cloud networks come with significant sacrifices including increased complexity, poor visibility, and the loss of network fundamentals such as dynamic routing and basic troubleshooting tools. Most organizations find themselves waiting for hyperscale networking solutions that can meet enterprise feature demands while maintaining operational simplicity.
Benefits
Enterprise-Grade Routing
Advanced routing controls across Google Cloud environments utilizing Alkira’s global routing policy provide the sophisticated traffic management capabilities enterprises require.
End-to-End Cloud Network Segmentation
Network-wide segmentation and micro-segmentation capabilities segregate GCP workloads and reduce security attack surfaces, ensuring comprehensive protection across distributed environments.
Cloud Firewall Security
Easily enforce uniform firewall security policies for Google Cloud single-region and multi-region application traffic, maintaining consistent security postures across all deployments.
Multi-Cloud Networking
Seamlessly and securely connect GCP workloads to multi-cloud and on-premises environments, enabling true hybrid cloud architectures without complexity.
Deep Cloud Network Visibility
A single dashboard provides operational visibility of cloud network health, availability, utilization, and application traffic flows, eliminating operational blind spots.
Better Together
Google Cloud Platform makes it easy for customers to purchase Alkira from their marketplace, allowing organizations to leverage existing vendor relationships and potentially retire Google Cloud committed spend.
Solution
The Alkira Platform delivers global cloud network infrastructure as-a-service through its Cloud Exchange Points (CXPs) – geographically distributed multi-cloud points of presence with routing and network service capabilities interconnected over the Alkira Cloud Backbone. The solution provides instant response for varying enterprise capacity needs at required scale, eliminating dependency on lengthy private circuit delivery times and wasteful provision-for-peak approaches.
Key solution components include integrated internet connectivity for GCP workloads, stateful security controls through intent-based policy enforcement, and seamless communication between remote users, sites, and on-premises data centers with GCP workloads. The platform can resolve IP address conflicts through network address translation rules and enforce cross-segment security policies as needed.
The entire global network is modeled through the intuitive Alkira Portal using a point-and-click interface, with provisioning completed in a single click and networks ready in minutes. This as-a-service consumption model aligns perfectly with GCP’s consumption model, allowing enterprises to easily operationalize their networking environment without procuring additional hardware, installing software, or learning complex cloud architectures.
The Alkira Platform provides a seamless, secure, and feature-rich experience for connecting GCP workloads to global networks extending across single or multiple Google Cloud regions and multi-cloud environments. By harnessing the power of Google Cloud’s vast backbone infrastructure, the solution delivers highly-scalable global connectivity that meets the most demanding modern enterprise needs in the cloud era. Organizations can now access the full potential of hyperscale networking while maintaining the enterprise-grade features, visibility, and control they require for mission-critical operations.
Ready to modernize with Network Infrastructure-as-a-Service? Learn how this partnership delivers comprehensive network connectivity and infrastructure automation through service-based architecture.
For more details read the solution briefs on the Google | Alkira partnership and Google Cloud NCC with Alkira.
For more information or to speak with a network specialist, contact us.