Cloudbrink is taking a swing at rival networking vendors with customer trials and independent tests that show its connectivity service significantly outperforms Cisco, Zscaler and other leading vendors. Although substantial challenges exist when attempting to balance security and performance in hybrid work environments, Cloudbrink claims to eliminate that trade-off and insists other vendors fall short.

Following a Fortune 100 entertainment company’s benchmark of Cloudbrink’s service against VPN, zero-trust network access (ZTNA) and SD-WAN offerings from Cisco, Zscaler, Pulse Secure, Perimeter 81 and Tailscale, Cloudbrink commissioned network lab Broadband Testing to verify that customer’s benchmarking.

Broadband Testing found that Cloudbrink’s hybrid access-as-a-service solution improves the performance of applications using an unreliable internet connection by 30 times, even with full security measures in place.

Network security – particularly for distributed environments – requires significant performance overhead. “If you use a VPN, for example, you can expect up to a 50% immediate loss of effective bandwidth,” Broadband Testing Founder Steve Broadhead said.

If security isn’t baked into the network connectivity service, “you’re going to take an already poor connection and you’re going to put a secure tunnel on top of it,” resulting in “even worse performance,” Cloudbrink CEO Prakash Mana said.

“What’s remarkable in Cloudbrink’s case is that a fully-secured ZTNA service still delivers hugely accelerated performance compared to the same connection with nothing added,” Broadhead said.

In addition, the tests concluded that Cloudbrink’s connectivity service increases throughput and reduces transfer time.

When testing a 10 MB file with 100 milliseconds of latency, transfer time was reduced from three minutes to 20 seconds with Cloudbrink’s solution. Taking that same 10 MB file with zero latency and 5% Packet loss, throughput rose from less than 2 MB/second to 67 MB/s with Cloudbrink. “Throughout all the increased latency, we still saw improvements,” Broadhead said.

Cloudbrink is “one of a handful of companies that is reimagining network and security architectures for the age of the hyperdistributed Enterprise,” IDC Research Manager Brandon Butler said. “Speed tests like this one show the power of how next-generation architectures can securely ensure high-quality digital experiences for users.”

According to Cloudbrink's Mana, “we’re cheating the system” by fully integrating security without sacrificing performance.

Cloudbrink’s rivals certainly make similar performance claims, but “we need to look at the fine print on those claims,” Mana said. “We live in a world where everybody is looking for sub-10 milliseconds of latency. Some of these top-tier vendors right off the bat will say ‘we'll deliver best-in-class performance, and oh, by the way – the moment you deploy our cloud services, expect an additional 100 milliseconds of latency.’ That is not acceptable,” he said.

Mana cited feedback from a Cloudbrink customer in the health care sector. After trialing various distributed networking services, they still couldn’t address the productivity issues the company’s end users were facing.

“As they deployed Cloudbrink, the end users that were complaining are now saying, … [they] don't want to miss even a single day of not using Cloudbrink while the company finalizes production rollout,” Mana said. “Those are the sentiments that we love, and I think that’s what the industry is looking for.”