At Itential, we’re always looking for ways to simplify the inherent complexity of network and infrastructure automation. That includes ensuring we build strong partnerships with other market leaders. Our latest exciting move is a partnership with Alkira, a multi-cloud connectivity solution that enables organizations to easily and flexibly leverage multiple cloud environments at scale.
Organizations can end up moving towards multi-cloud in a few different ways. It could be a pre-planned strategy to avoid ballooning cloud costs, a vague possibility for the future, or something that’s happened organically as different line of business and application teams have adopted different clouds to suit their own projects. Overall, though, we’re seeing a general shift in the industry toward a multi-cloud operating model, even if it’s still in early stages.
Therefore, regardless of how you’re approaching multi-cloud, the challenges and complexity it creates will become a top priority for your organization soon if they aren’t already. That’s where our partnership with Alkira comes in. Alkira simplifies management of the connectivity between cloud environments to address multi-cloud complexity, while Itential integrates with Alkira and external systems like IPAM, ITSM, and security along with physical network infrastructure. This creates a single unified interface for automation across all networks.
“Closely tracking both Alkira and Itential since their product launches, we see this partnership as a significant leap towards more automated, API-centric enterprise networking,” said Roy Chua, Founder and Principal at technology analyst firm AvidThink. “Integrating Alkira’s expertise in multi-cloud networking with Itential’s advanced network automation, this alliance is set to boost operational speed and reduce error potential, greatly easing network management in the multi-cloud era.”
Why Multi-Cloud Is Growing
As organizations have shifted more infrastructure to the cloud as part of cloud migration initiatives, the idea that a single cloud provider is the ideal has begun to fall out of favor. Different lines of business and application teams have different requirements for their projects, and the cloud provider that suits one team may not suit another. Plus, trying to use a single cloud provider can lead to untenably high costs and a lack of control over your own infrastructure.
Organizations are seeking more flexible and affordable strategies for managing data and applications across both on-premises and public cloud environments. According to Futuriom’s latest research report, multi-cloud approaches offer “a more flexible and automated IT environment that can blend resources wherever they may reside, whether on premises, in a cloud, or in multiple clouds.” To take a deep dive into emerging technologies and trends in hybrid and multi-cloud networking, check out Futuriom’s full 2023 report, The Future of Hybrid Cloud Automation and NetDevOps.
However, the importance of these advantages doesn’t mean there are no challenges — it just means that it’s time to solve them. With a move to a more flexible, large-scale, multi-cloud networking environment, the following areas of concern can be significant roadblocks:
- The need to integrate network automation capabilities with every cloud, network technology, and external IT system so that processes can be automated end-to-end across such a large and complex environment.
- The increased security risks due to the global and flexible nature of modern enterprise networks that aim to support a BYOD, work-from-anywhere hybrid campus model.
- The difficulty that automation across many different cloud environments and network technologies can present without a unified platform approach.
How do you address those challenges to achieve the benefits listed above without falling into traps of complexity or scale? The answer is a comprehensive platform approach, one that offers robust integration capabilities across every component of your network infrastructure regardless of vendor, and one that can create a layer of standardization and consistency that unifies a diverse, non-standard, multi-cloud environment.
Key Advantages of Leveraging Itential + Alkira for Automating Hybrid, Multi-Cloud Networks
Itential’s software enables the entire network team to participate in automating their network domains, integrating with the tools and solutions they already have and orchestrating end-to-end processes. Alkira simplifies the provisioning, operation, and management of multi-cloud networking, making it straightforward to connect different sites, users, or cloud applications together. By integrating these two platforms at the API level, network teams can build automations that utilize Alkira’s unique cloud features and network and security services, along with integrating with on-prem network and security solutions, IT systems like IPAM, ITSM, and sources of truth.
Let’s zoom in a little. From conversations with customers, partners, and our own automation experts right here at Itential, here are several use cases which will be critical pieces of a multi-cloud migration:
- Cloud Onboarding
- Cloud Security
- On-Prem to Cloud
- Multi-Cloud Connectivity
- Inter-Region Connectivity (Cloud Backbone/Exchange)
Organizations exploring multi-cloud environments will see significant return from investing in automation of these use cases, and only by leveraging the unique combination of Itential and Alkira can organizations address all of these with the same unified set of automation tools. Both platforms are delivered as a Service with deep integration capabilities between them, enabling teams to automate complex multi-cloud management processes from a single, unified interface. The combination of Itential and Alkira creates a kind of connective tissue between all the different networks, IT systems, and cloud components of an organization’s architecture. Our partnership delivers a uniquely centralized approach to automation, security, and self-service automation delivery.
Itential + Alkira Multi-Cloud Management in the Real World
It might sound like I’m looking mostly at the future, but don’t mistake this for a bunch of hypothetical talk. We have customers actively implementing this multi-cloud platform strategy today. You can actually hear more directly from our joint customer Guruprasad Ramamoorthy, Global Head of Network Architecture, Engineering, and Operations at S&P Global, in a webinar where he joins Itential’s CTO and Co-Founder Chris Wade and Alkira’s CTO and Co-Founder, Atif Khan. The three leaders walk through S&P’s real-world implementation of the Alkira + Itential partnered solution that enabled their network services team to dramatically simplify multi-cloud network architecture and introduce scale at an unprecedented pace with automation and orchestration. You can check it out here.
As the industry moves into this next phase of evolution for networking and infrastructure, it’s important to adopt the right solutions early and build consistent methodology that enables easy adoption of future technologies and additional cloud environments. A forward-looking approach to multi-cloud architecture isn’t just a solution for the pressures of today, it’s a way to set up your organization for future success in a way that even going cloud-first alone can’t achieve. Itential and Alkira’s partnership offers organizations the opportunity to unify and standardize automation across a diverse technology stack, which will continue to prove useful going forward and will enable a level of automation scale that was previously impossible.
To learn more about our partnership, click here, and to watch a demo of how it works, click here.
Mike Elrom
Director of Customer & Tech Partner Enablement ‐ Itential
Mike Elrom is the Director of Customer & Tech Partner Enablement at Itential who has spent his entire professional career working on telecommunications networks. Holding roles within Network Operations and Software Development teams, Mike’s career has naturally progressed into network automation. At Itential, Mike has the pleasure of working with our customer’s network engineers while he and his team are responsible for enabling our customers to become successful automation engineers.
