Network Infrastructure-as-a-Service : The Fastest Way to the Cloud

IT Agility in the Era of Digital Experience

Nearly every company today is in the business of delivering digital experiences. To customers, partners, employees, vendors, the media, and more. In this era of digital experience, CIOs now recognize that the speed of business is largely governed by the speed of IT. In fact, in many markets the speed of IT has become the de facto basis of competition.

Why does IT agility matter? A primary reason is simple responsiveness to a world experiencing sustained and unprecedented change. Whether capturing new opportunities or performing well even during periods of disruption, CIOs seek to be customer-led and data-driven across a highly connected enterprise. And of course, delivering projects faster means faster recovery of investment and faster redeployment of IT resources to the next wave of innovation and customer value.

Faster time delivery for IT projects also provides more opportunity for iteration and experimentation. Whether rapidly incorporating user feedback, experimenting with new offers, or tightly tailoring products and services to segmented audiences, IT agility provides many benefits beyond just faster recovery of project investment.

And so in the endless quest for IT speed, enterprises are embracing Dev-Ops best practices throughout their teams, implementing hyper-automation everywhere possible, and leaning in on the cloud.

The Promise of Cloud

The promise of cloud is a promise of agility. Transitioning away from physical data centers and their massive CAPEX, inflexible hardware solutions, and locally anchored presence in an ever-expanding geography of remote users and workloads.

But current network architectures were never designed for the level of change that the cloud has created.

First, there are three entirely new classes of networking. Securely connecting on-prem to cloud. Networking inside the cloud. And networking across cloud regions and multiple clouds. All with their own new and unique requirements.

Secondly, the cloud has created a compounding of complexity. As apps have moved into the cloud, every cloud region has essentially become its own data center. With its own local networking, user access, security, network services, internet, and visibility. Complexity is now multiplied instead of added. Network islands, silos, and visibility blinds spots also multiply. And this complexity also exposes deep expertise gaps across IT teams both in cloud-specific architectures and in the networking required to support them.

This combination of significant new requirements coupled with a massive increase in complexity and associated skill gaps has left existing networks simply unable to keep pace with the rest of IT. For this reason, we see CIOs prioritizing network transformation as one of the easiest ways to create a step function improvement in overall IT agility.

Cloud is a generational change. A foundational change. And this level of change is way beyond something that can just be patched with a new software tool or orchestration scheme. In every IT generation, foundational changes in requirements have always been answered with architectural innovation in networking. And so enterprises find themselves in need a new network architecture.

Welcome to Alkira Network Infrastructure-as-a-Service

Alkira Network Infrastructure-as-a-Service is the fastest way to unify users, sites, and clouds. This innovative networking platform is 100% built in the cloud and delivered as-a-service. No hardware to buy and no agents to install.

Why build networks in the cloud? Simple. Networking on-prem to cloud, in the cloud, and cloud to cloud without inefficient traffic backhauling requires networking and network services co-resident in the cloud. Close to your users and workloads for an optimized digital experience.

Compute and storage moved into the cloud and are now consumed as-a-service. Why not the network? Our as-a-service model delivers more than just cloud-like consumption with PAYG and subscription options. It also provides the first truly elastic network that spins up and down based on real-time business demand, so you only deploy and pay for the network resources you need, when you need them. And all the manual network configurations and complex routing are fully automated so your network team can focus on policy and not plumbing.

Why is Network Infrastructure-as-a-Service an agentless architecture? Because installing agents in every VPC and VNET only adds to complexity instead of reducing it when simplification is the only way forward. What resources are these agents consuming? How do I keep them all upgraded? What about security? Compliance? Visibility? Every network engineer knows that a sprawl software agents is an architectural step backwards.

The Alkira Advantage

Customers ranging from Fortune 100 to unicorn start-ups are switching to Alkira Network Infrastructure-as-a-Service for the following capabilities:

Connect Anything

• Auto-connect users, sites, and clouds with no incremental network infrastructure
• Easily insert network services like firewalls with built-in autoscaling and traffic symmetry
• Manual configurations are either fully automated or reduced to a few clicks
• No costly data center or colocation builds, and no traffic backhauling
• End-to-end resiliency covering cloud connectivity, region-to-region and cloud-to-cloud failover

Unify Everything

• End-to-end visibility across on-prem to deep into and across cloud
• Strong, secure, flexible segmentation that flows across on-prem to cloud
• Uniform policy posture for security and traffic across your entire network

Scale Everywhere

• Multi-cloud support is built in. Adding a new cloud is just drag-and-drop
• REST APIs and Terraform support for full automation and CI/CD pipeline integration
• As-a-service delivery with no hardware, software, or agents to deploy
• Elastic networking that scales up and down with business demand

The Need for Speed

The common thread underlying the Alkira Network Infrastructure-as-a-Service customer experience is a generational leap forward in IT agility. Customers tell us that networking tasks that used to take months now take hours. And what used to require days now takes minutes.

With Alkira, your network teams will move faster. Manage less. And save more.

To learn more about Alkira Network Infrastructure-as-a-Service, visit www.alkira.com. I also encourage you to sign up for a personalized demo. It’s quite eye-opening to see an enterprise-grade global network designed in a portal and deployed in minutes.