Networking startup Cloudbrink announced a point-of-presence (PoP) milestone just months after exiting stealth with a hybrid-access-as-a-service (HaaS) that the company claims can offer five-times the geographical coverage and “significantly faster” end-to-end services than traditional VPN platforms.

“Our point-of-presence coverage is much bigger than the top three market leaders all combined,” CEO and co-founder Prakash Mana said about the vendor now having 600 PoPs. “Recently VMware did 200 points-of-presence. We're well past all of those points because we're edge-native, cloud-native. Every cloud platform, edge compute is a point-of-presence for CloudBrink.”

“We want to bring application access points so close to the end user that your public internet WAN becomes your corporate LAN,” Mana told SDxCentral during a call he made from a parking lot using the Cloudbrink HaaS, which he said is testament to the service improving performance in Zoom rooms for remote users.

The HaaS solution is deployed as an application, the Brink App, on end-user devices, and enterprise access PoPs that Cloudbrink calls Flexible, Autonomous, Smart and Temporary (FAST) edges are automatically created close to the end user. Cloudbrink’s FAST Edges are deployed in existing infrastructure from public cloud, telco, and edge services from AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM, and other service providers across six continents (excluding Antarctica).

According to Mana, Cloudbrink will deliver 2,000 PoPs by the end of the year, and “the market should not be surprised if [the company] surpasses over 10,000 FAST edges by 2025.”

Machine-learning (ML) driven intelligence within the BrinkApp is capable of identifying the nearest FAST edge access point, and the Cloudbrink software essentially transforms internet or cellular connection at any location and provides a secure end-to-end connection through access to the FAST edges.

Mana noted the current model for cloud-based and edge networking is to bring users all the way to “wherever your cloud gateways are, wherever your office or application is,” which he said in the best-case scenario is about 70-100 milliseconds away, but normally, it's about 100 to 300 milliseconds away.

Today 84% of the global workforce live no more than seven to 20 milliseconds from an edge, according to Mana, and by leveraging ML to identify where each user is, Cloudbrink is able to take applications to the end-user rather than taking the user to each application.

Typically, a FAST edge is no more than five milliseconds from the user, and offers scalability as they can “shrink and grow based on demand,” Mana said.

“What you will notice going forward is these traditional players, they used to add one PoP every year. … Post-Covid they invested heavily in it and now they're adding two PoPs in any given year,” he added. “Cloudbrink will continue to add not one or two PoPs, but about 1,000 to 2,000 FAST edges every year because of this cloud-native infrastructure with at its core, machine learning.”

ESG Analyst Bob Laliberte interviewed a Cloudbrink customer’s IT director and found the company never saw CPU utilization exceed one-half of a percent on any devices it was using.

“In addition to the low CPU utilization rates, the IT director highlighted other results the organization achieved using Cloudbrink HaaS technology,” Laliberte wrote in a blog.

The Cloudbrink customer also reported reduced latency and increased network capacity.

“The IT director highlighted the opportunity to improve the performance of telecommunication links, especially in developing countries. While they saw 10 to 15 times the capacity of telecom links using HaaS in developed areas, the HaaS could deliver twice the stated capacity, even in developing areas with limited telecom capabilities,” Laliberte added.

In one test the company performed, the current VPN was experiencing 200-millisecond latency from the U.S. to Singapore, and the HaaS cut that to five milliseconds.

Laliberte noted when asked if HAaaS technology would replace VPNs, the IT director responded "absolutely … we are 100% all in on a hybrid workforce. We continue to move applications into the cloud. And, with Cloudbrink, it's going to make access to those applications that much quicker."