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Last week I provided an overview of the innovative Alkira platform. This week I’m dealing with the “so what” question, which for me is answered in two ways – Alkira solves for today’s most relevant WAN use cases, and it also provides a range of business benefits.
From the Alkira Topology Map, customers can rapidly provision a range of capabilities to solve WAN use cases, in a resilient, secure, performant, and cost-effective manner.
- Global Backbone: Alkira leverages the world’s largest networks from AWS, Azure, and GCP to provide connectivity between campus, branch, data centre, remote users, third parties and cloud.
- Multi-cloud Connectivity: Simple connectors provide access to AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI, providing the performance of direct services such as ExpressRoute and Direct Connect but without the complexity.
- Secure Internet Connectivity: Integration of third-party network services at your CXP (Cloud Exchange Point) provides secure connectivity to SaaS and the wider set of Internet services.
- Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA): Secure remote access to internal users and partners to internal and cloud applications is provided through ZTNA.
These capabilities bring a range of benefits for businesses with a global footprint.
- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Cost is reduced through the removal of expensive legacy circuits, network appliance rationalisation, and a simplified design.
- Lifecycle Management: As the solution is fully virtual, consumption-based and located in the cloud, there are no complex hardware or software refreshes or solution lock-in.
- Rapid Deployment: Provisioning of the service at the relevant CXP through the Topology Map is automated and immediate. Also new CXPs can be stood up in minutes anywhere that there is a cloud provider presence.
- Flexibility: Customers don’t need to go all in, they can pick and choose the services they wish to consume, in the locations most suitable for their environment.
The diagram above illustrates capabilities of Alkira, which I believe will be a good fit for multi-national organisations with a requirement for secure global connectivity and multi-cloud services. As usual, I am always happy to get corrections, feedback, and comments or in this case to hear from customers.