The network landscape is about to change once again. From the early days of everything being a physical connection we have come a long way. Wireless networks gave us an alternative to physical wires. But we still needed all that physical networking in our data centres.
The arrival of virtualisation changed everything. We were able to virtualise some of the networking functions, and over the past two decades, we have moved further. Cloud computing became a major challenge, especially as increasing workloads moved to the cloud.
As companies adopted more than one cloud, we encountered new issues. The solution? Networking as a Service, Software Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN), and more recently, Multi-Cloud Networking (MCN).
One company, Alkira, wants to go further. It is taking MCN and its existing NaaS and turning them into an enhanced version of NaaS that it calls a Networking Infrastructure as a Service Platform.
In May 2024, Alkira secured over $100m in Series C funding. It said the money would be invested in accelerating its innovation around the networking market. Key areas it plans to spend on are its multi-cloud networking solutions, new connectivity models for WAN and changing how customers view networking. Unsurprisingly, there was mention of making the network fit for AI.
To understand more about Alkira and its NaaS plans, Enterprise Times talked with Amir Khan, President, CEO & Founder, and Atif Khan, CTO & Founder.
Alkira’s vision is to make life simple
Whenever a company says it is reinventing something in the technology world, it always helps to understand its vision. Khan explained that after selling their previous company, Viptella, to Cisco, they recognised they saw an enormous opportunity to change the networking industry.
The first step was for Alkira to build a cloud inside the hyperscaler environment. They did not try to emulate others by just doing orchestration because that is dependent upon each cloud vendor. It makes it extremely hard to do multi-cloud because you get tied to the schedules and technology of each cloud vendor.
The key for Alkira was to have control of its own destiny. To do that, Khan said, “We built our own cloud inside the hyperscaler environments. It is a comprehensive networking infrastructure which is offered as a service. You don’t deploy any software or hardware. It is completely used from your computer, and you can deploy a global network.
“Before this, it was difficult to deploy those networks because you had to procure the physical connection as a starting point. With Alkira, there are no physical components required. You come to our portal, and you say, I want to deploy it in Sydney, Singapore, the US. You click a button, and you automatically provision everything in the background. It means you can have as many fully routed segments as you want. It is all done automatically, you just name the segments.”
How do customers see this?
Network architects see the world as connections and segments. They see physical components such as routers, switches and firewalls as being the links between those segments. Even when they use virtual networks and virtual machines, they still need to be connected together through tunnels.
The network design and technologies are also affected by other physical components such as servers and storage and applications software. This is because the network is seen as simply the underlying infrastructure required to connect other hardware and software.
Khan sees another, and often more challenging problem, software updates and security patches. In a multi-cloud environment, this means understanding what is different in each environment and having the ability to manage complexity.
For Khan, all of this plays to the value-proposition that Alkira brings. It provides customers who are trying to connect diverse technologies with a common infrastructure and abstraction layer. It doesn’t matter what the underlying cloud and infrastructure are. The customer has a single common view of everything, simplifying its network operations.
Khan went on to say, “It’s fully routed, you can come in over IPsec, extend your SD Wan or have direct connect, and even have technologies such as MPLS come into these virtualized environments. This is because we make the whole thing, infrastructure as a service.”
Simplification is key
Removing complexity from any environment is good. In the case of Alkira, Khan points to several areas where the company has made life easier. For example, routing. Khan says that many cloud providers have limits on the number of routes they can provide, often between 1,000 and 5,000. For Alkira, that is not an issue because its technology supports customers with up to 50,000 routes.
Another area is the integration of firewalls into the infrastructure. With over 30% of companies reported to be using more than 100 firewalls, physical and virtual, Khan says it can reduce that by up to 80%
For most large enterprises, managing multiple firewalls is a highly skilled and complex task. Attackers bypass a firewall by finding a route through it. The more firewalls you have, the more rules and complexity you have, and that leads to risk. By reducing the number of firewalls by 80%, Alkira is improving security and reducing risk.
Making a black box approach, compliant
But, simplification also comes with a challenge, and that is often a loss of understanding as to what is going on under the covers. For organisations that are subject to compliance, for example, the EU NIS2 and DORA, visibility is critical.
Khan says that simplicity helps with visibility and compliance. A key part of that visibility is that while Alkira is simplifying everything, it is not running the network for the customer. It is up to the customer to build its network on Alkira’s infrastructure. Because the customer builds its network, it has visibility into what it has.
An example of enhanced visibility is customers using MPLS who often lose sight of their routes. They have zero visibility into the provider network. By using the Alkira infrastructure, they control all their routes and set the policies that they want.
For DORA, this complete control is critical because of its resilience requirements. If they have complete control of what is deployed, rather than relying on a third party, they can plan their minimum resilience layer. Once that is known, they can deploy that immediately across Alkira’s platform.
Scalability and consumption made simple
Another advantage for customers is that they do not have to worry about scalability, vertically or horizontally. That is all handled by the Alkira platform. Customers say what level of bandwidth they want and the platform scales. Customers pay for what they use when they use it, and if they need more capacity, they buy it.
Enabling that is the ability of Alkira to sit on GCP, AWS and Azure. That ensures it has access to the resources when the customer requests it.
Importantly, Alkira offers customers different consumption models and tracks their usage. It can be subscription-based, where the customer has to stay within an agreed bandwidth. If they need to exceed that, they buy extra. Alternatively, they can opt for a bursting package where they pay only for the excess when they exceed their usage.
To support customers, Alkira tracks their usage so that they can identify bottlenecks and fine-tune their capacity needs. That usage can often identify where a customer has significantly over-specified their needs, allowing them to adjust their usage. It is also important for compliance, such as DORA, and for cybersecurity. With DORA, it tells them what they need for resilience. For cybersecurity, it allows teams to spot sudden increases in traffic and, therefore, investigate.
However, like all cloud models, scale-up and scale-out is part of the model. Scaling back is more complex, especially when the customer has a fixed-term contract. The same is true with Alkira. Customers on a fixed-term contract cannot reduce what they pay for until the end of the contract. This is where they need to take advantage of bursting and usage modelling.
How does AI alter customer consumption?
No conversation around infrastructure would be complete without looking at the impact of AI. Many customers are still moving data to the AI engine for processing, although several vendors now allow the AI to come to the data. The latter drastically reduces the amount of network traffic.
Importantly, it is the modelling tools that Alkira provides that will help customers understand the costs of their AI development. They will be able to see where data is going and what that costs. This is particularly important when data is flowing across multiple clouds.
Khan commented, “AI is causing customers to be pushed into multiple environments. If they want to use open AI, they have to deploy Azure. There are similar restrictions when using Gemini or Bedrock. We are starting to see increased traffic between the clouds. It used to be mostly between the user and the cloud. Now you’re starting to see applications distributed from that perspective.
Alkira supports the major cloud platforms and has been built to utilise whatever capacity the cloud providers have made available. This allows it to move that data for customers, but there is a catch. Alkira is seeing data egress charges as causing problems. The cost of moving data across clouds can easily destroy the budget for many companies.
Khan pointed out that Microsoft has now deployed a model where they detail what they will charge and put a cap on it. Other cloud providers are also looking at how to do this. For Alkira, this is charging that they cannot help customers with because it is levied by the underlying cloud providers. The likelihood is that it will drive companies to look at AI models where you move the AI to the data to reduce data egress costs.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
What Alkira is offering customers is markedly different from what they have today. It combines the virtualisation of all the network components at scale with complete customer control. There are no points where it manages the network, nor are there points where customers lose control of what they are deploying. This is because the customer builds everything on the Alkira platform.
Alkira sees its role as being a highly abstracted and cloud agnostic network infrastructure as a service solution. It provides a single interface to multiple clouds to prevent customers from having to work with multiple cloud providers and the nuances of their platforms. This allows the customer to better focus its resources on the business.
As companies increase their use of data centres around the globe, they do not want to be managing the connectivity between them. They want to concentrate on the servers, the applications, data and the security of their environments. Alkira believes that it is the only vendor who, at this moment, can deliver what they need.
