Rethinking the enterprise network backbone

Multiple business imperatives are driving CIOs to re-examine and re-invent their approach to network infrastructure, including the mission critical backbone that supports highly complex, bandwidth-intensive, multi-cloud environments. One emerging alternative: backbone-as-a-service (BBaaS) offerings.

As with other “as-a-service” offerings, the idea behind BBaaS is to simplify the process of providing secure, high-performance connectivity across geographic regions. It’s especially attractive as an alternative to MPLS, promising to do for wide-area backbones what the cloud did for compute, storage, and application development.

The business pressures prompting the need for such a service are many, including:

• M&A/Business Expansion: Enterprises are constantly changing, whether through sudden mergers and acquisition, digital transformation efforts, or growth into new markets. Networks need to be designed to help organizations accelerate the pace of change, rather than slow things down.

• Edge: The proliferation of IoT devices in industries such as manufacturing, retail, energy, utilities and oil and gas is generating new demands for high-bandwidth, low-latency edge-to-data center and edge-to-cloud connectivity.

• Hybrid multi-cloud: The debate over cloud vs. on-prem has been pretty much settled; and the answer is both. Organizations are living in a hybrid, multi-cloud world where some applications are moving to the cloud, others are remaining on-premises, and many are using multiple hyperscalers and SaaS providers. Connectivity across this complex ecosystem needs to be resilient, secure and seamless.

• AI: The emergence of AI as a C-level priority creates new requirements for network capacity to move large data sets between on-prem and cloud locations, and to deliver high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity for traditional apps that now have an AI component embedded in them, such as Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Out with the old, in with the new

Historically, enterprises relied on a MPLS for much of their wide-area connectivity requirements. Provided by traditional telecom vendors, MPLS is a reliable, secure technology, but it is also expensive and inflexible — it can take months to get a new circuit provisioned.

The scattering of employees to remote work sites, the migration of applications to the cloud and the requirements for networks to provide agile, flexible, cost-effective, any-to-any connectivity have rendered MPLS obsolete.

In its place, enterprises are looking for a cloud-based service that features one-click provisioning, on-demand scalability, consumption-based pricing, a self-service portal, and, best of all, no hardware to own or manage.

Alkira CBaaS delivers connectivity and more for today’s AI-driven networks

One such offering is Alkira Global Backbone-as-a-Service. It provides high-capacity, low-latency, site-to-site, elastic connectivity between core data centers, edge locations, remote sites and any multi-cloud site – with no equipment to manage or software to download.

Customers connect their sites to Alkira Cloud Exchange Points (CXPs) located in different regions around the globe and get encrypted IP connectivity on hyper-scale cloud infrastructure, providing high performance. The service also enables enterprises to migrate their SD-WAN fabrics to the cloud.

Through the Alkira portal, enterprises can build, deploy, manage and monitor their entire network from a single interface. Alkira also offers integrated security services and provides visibility and governance.

The benefits are increased speed and agility, a shift from Capex to Opex for funding, and the ability to scale up or down with a single click.

Offerings such as the Alkira Global Backbone-as-a-Service support digital transformation efforts, help drive innovation, and enable organizations to reap the full benefits of the AI revolution.

To learn more about Alkira Global Backbone-as-a-Service, visit: https://www.alkira.com/global-backbone-as-a-service/