Cloud networking vendor Alkira dusted off its extranet expertise to offer the vintage technology with a modern as-a-service twist targeted at "any organization with a large number of customers that want to connect without being told exactly how to connect," Alkira CTO Atif Khan told SDxCentral.

Alkira's extranet-as-a-service (EaaS) offering will be available as part of its broader cloud networking platform and will allow users connected to a network in different physical locations to access the same shared resources.

By leveraging the vendor's Cloud Exchange Points (CXPs) – virtual points of presence built on public cloud hyperscale infrastructure – customers can virtualize and automate manual cloud networking tasks and deploy, manage and grow an extranet at scale. This capability is significant because it decreases the amount of time needed to onboard a new partner or customer from multiple months to a few hours, Khan said.

Although extranet technology has existed since the 1980s as a way to share information between parties, EaaS seeks to simplify the setup and operation of cloud-based information sharing by removing the do-it-yourself aspect of building an extranet and onboarding new users, Gartner Analyst Andrew Lerner told SDxCentral.

"Traditionally, extranets were established in data centers, nearby applications and data, using dedicated circuits or IPsec VPN. As organizations are migrating applications to the public cloud and [software-as-a-service], it is causing them to rethink their existing extranet approaches," Lerner explained.

Native public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google, for example, "don't offer robust advanced networking configurations to support complex extranet connectivity scenarios," which is driving demand for EaaS solutions, Lerner noted. "There is a desire to simplify and replace physical infrastructure, including routers, firewalls and VPN appliances with software and solutions that are more API- and software-oriented," he added.

While there is certainly enterprise interest in EaaS, it's less of a market category and more of a product feature in "very early days" of adoption. In addition to Alkira, Lerner highlighted Graphiant and Trustgrid as the two other vendors with a heavy focus on EaaS.

Alkira touted S&P Global, Splunk, Tekion and Koch Industries as some of its existing EaaS customers, and Khan noted the technology has a variety of use cases across industry verticals.

Koch Industries, for example, provides a service out of a data center based in the United States, "and it was a very complicated process for them," Khan said. With significant amounts of hardware deployment and configuration involved, "every time they would onboard [a new client] there was a need for new connectivity. ... And then they were struggling with adding security into it [and] firewalls into it," he explained.

Extranet technology on its own is challenging when it comes to legacy equipment but "it's a nightmare when you combine this external connectivity with overlapping IP addresses and with security [requirements]," Khan argued. To that point, he noted that with Alkira's EaaS offering, "from a customer's point of view it takes literally minutes for all of this to happen."