Networking is one of the more complicated and mission critical elements of cloud transformations for IT teams to consider, Alkira CEO Amir Khan said – and SD-WAN “isn’t enough in a multicloud world.”

“SD-WAN was primarily done for outside the cloud to marry multiple different types of transports and not about optimizing the cloud,” Khan told SDxCentral. “It brought you into the cloud [but] didn't do anything inside the cloud.”

According to Khan, SD-WAN solutions don’t enable IT teams to integrate new cloud networks into their existing network. SD-WAN is also “limited to establishing basic cloud connectivity,” he added. “When it comes to inserting network services or controlling security policies at high throughput, SD-WAN falls short.”

With these challenges in mind Khan founded Alkira – a provider of cloud networking-as-a-service (CNaaS). Alkira creates a common infrastructure across all clouds by building its own cloud inside the hyperscaler clouds, enabling connectivity over multicloud environments, and also across hybrid and remote-user environments.

Khan said this type of networking-as-a-service (NaaS) overcomes “whatever limitations, nuances were there in the hyperscaler infrastructure,” and provides consolidation of firewalls, end-to-end segmentation, and end-to-end routing between cloud regions, on-premises, and internet or software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

“Think of us as the Alkira cloud, but it sits inside the hyperscaler infrastructure by using raw capabilities of the hyperscalers, and that gives us unlimited scale,” he explained.

Gartner Analyst Andrew Lerner recently highlighted multicloud networking software (MCNS) as a key area of network innovation that will significantly impact the tech industry going forward, with Alkira listed as an emerging vendor to watch.

With Gartner’s framework for converged networking and security – secure access service edge (SASE) – still one of the industry’s loudest buzzwords, many vendors are focusing on integrating security capabilities with SD-WAN to achieve a full SASE architecture.

But Khan said SD-WAN cannot be the network solution SASE relies on.

Instead, “NFV is better put into the cloud rather than put into the branches or in data centers,” he explained. “If you deploy NFV in the branches you have to take responsibility as a customer or as a managed service provider to upgrade those services across all those branches.”

Deploying network services in the cloud, Khan added, reduces what enterprises have to worry about to just choosing their own security policies.

“[The network service] is reasonably distributed, but still  more centralized compared to deploying it in every single branch out there or every single edge location out there,” he said. “So it becomes a much more manageable problem for enterprises.”