Multicloud networking vendor Alkira expanded its security portfolio to include Check Point's CloudGuard firewalls.

“We had some key customers who had standardized on Check Point CloudGuard firewalls,” Alkira CTO Atif Khan told SDxCentral, adding that alongside Palo Alto Networks, Check Point is “one of the most widely deployed firewalls in the industry.”

The collaboration enables existing Check Point firewall customers to extend the same security functionality to multicloud and on-premises networks alike. Customers have the option of bringing their own license or subscribing through Alkira’s Cloud Services Exchange (CSX).

“The Check Point CloudGuard platform provides cloud-native security with advanced threat prevention for all assets and workloads across the public, hybrid, and multicloud environments, enabling customers to benefit from a single unified security platform,” explained TJ Gonen, head of cloud security at Check Point, in a statement.

Announced in early 2020, Alkira’s CSX automates and abstracts the complexity of deploying, managing, and networking multicloud workloads into a point-and-click service. The platform integrates with all of the major public cloud providers and handles resource deployment and configuration. It can also establish WAN underlays on demand for inter-branch office connectivity over the public cloud providers’ private networks.

According to Khan, the combination of Check Point and Alkira reduces complexity of deploying CloudGuard in the public cloud by automating the process while also reducing the potential for configuration errors.

And because CloudGuard is running on Alkira’s Cloud Exchange Points — what the vendor calls its points of presence (PoPs) — fewer firewall instances may be required to support a multicloud network than if manually deployed, he claimed.

Today’s announcement marks Alkira’s latest security partnership. This spring, the company announced a similar collaboration with Palo Alto Networks, which allowed customers to spin up the security vendor's VM-series firewalls in Alkira's CXPs.

The approach mirrors that of several SD-WAN vendors like Aryaka and Hewlett Packard Enterprise to achieve a secure access service edge (SASE) architecture as defined by Gartner. Both of these SD-WAN vendors also partner with Check Point for SASE security.

Alkira fits somewhere in the middle of this trend, allowing customers to integrate their existing SD-WAN and firewall infrastructure into their multicloud strategy, Khan explained.

“No one company is able to do everything at a top-notch level,” he explained. “I give you this capability of building a global, best-of-breed, worldwide network using the infrastructure that Alkira provides, and then you can bring in your third-party services and plug them in if you want to.”

Khan argues this approach is more practical for most large businesses that are unlikely to rely on WAN and security functionality from a single vendor.

“There is hardly any large company, which we are working with, which has everything from one provider,” he said, describing the approach as “SASE plus plus.”

Alkira has expanded its reach considerably since emerging from stealth mode early last year. Most recently, the vendor announced strategic partnerships with both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services to allow existing public cloud customers to adopt Alkira's multicloud capabilities.

As part of this, Alkira's CSX platform is now listed in both cloud providers' marketplace. These partnerships have helped Alkira secure several fortune 100 customers, including Koch Industries, the company claims.

An early investor in Alkira, the multi-national now uses a combination of CSX and Palo Alto firewalls to connect its more than 700 locations across 70 countries.