Alkira, today announced Koch Industries is using its Cloud Services Exchange (CSX) in conjunction with Palo Alto Network’s VM-series virtual next-generation firewalls to secure multicloud and branch traffic.

According to Matt Hoag, CTO at Koch Business Solutions, the combination of Alkira’s CSX and Palo Alto Networks’ firewalls allowed the company to vastly simplify its network, which spans multiple public clouds and more than 700 locations across 70 countries.

“We started down this journey, probably five, six years ago with a large push to the cloud,” Hoag said. “At the time, there really wasn’t anything even remotely like this, and so we did a built it yourself.”

And while the network Koch architected to support its shift to the cloud worked, “we still felt it was an overly complex solution,” he said.

“We run networks because we have to, not because they are a product that we offer,” Hoag added. “It’s a challenge for us to keep up with cloud networking and cloud security, simply because again that’s not our bread and butter.”

That’s where Alkira’s CSX platform came in. Koch Enterprises was an early investor in Alkira and helped to shape its development almost from the beginning.

Launched last spring, the subscription-based offering was designed to automate the orchestration and networking of multicloud deployments. Using the service, customers could quickly spin up and network workloads in any number of the various public clouds, without having to understand the nuances inherent to each.

In addition to multicloud networking, an update to the platform in December enabled customers to provision underlay networks on demand by taking advantage of the cloud provider’s existing private backbone networks.

And with the latest update, customers, including Koch, can now automatically deploy Palo Alto Networks’ VM-series firewalls when they spin up a network.

According to Alkira CTO Atif Khan, the integration and automation of Palo Alto Networks allows customers to not only deploy WAN on demand but secure that traffic with a next-generation firewall.

When a customer spins up a workload in CSX, they have the option of securing it with a Palo Alto Networks VM-series firewall. When enabled, Alkira acts almost like a managed service provider, deploying, configuring, and networking both the workload and the firewall.

Once deployed, Khan explained that the infrastructure, management, and lifecycle of the firewall is fully managed by Alkira, and the customer is effectively handed the keys to the management console where they can define security policy and mitigate threats.

This tight integration also means that customers don’t have to worry about whether the firewall will scale up and down with traffic. Alkira handles all of that Khan explained.

“It’s really about the easy button here,” Brian Pelham, Director of Product Management at Palo Alto Networks, said, added that together, Palo Alto Networks and Alkira are able to drastically simplify both networking and security from any branch or cloud workload to its destination.

According to Hoag, this has allowed Koch Enterprises to dramatically reduce the time required to deploy workloads to the cloud from weeks and months to hours and days.

“When a business says ‘I need something next week,’ previously it was a ‘not going to happen,’ now,” he said, those services can often be deployed within the day.