Cloudbrink emerged from stealth with a new take on network access that it claims will provide “what SD-WAN vendors have been promising, but so far failed to deliver.”

The startup is backed with $25 million in funding led by Highland Capital Partners and The Fabric. Its product is a “hybrid-access-as-a-service” (HAaaS) networking solution that involves no hardware or upgrades to existing broadband lines, but instead uses the company's Brink App which can run on laptop or other devices, like a home Wi-Fi router.

The "crucial difference" is that SD-WAN solutions typically involve a dual broadband link and some special hardware to terminate it, according to Cloudbrink.

Cloudbrink co-Founder and CEO Prakash Mana told SDxCentral the product targets demand for an in-office-like experience with “lightning-fast” access to applications such as Office 365, Salesforce, any SaaS application, or any data center application – “all of that with invisible levels of security.”

“We take this entire stack that was previously built for the in-office experience and compress it into a software, which can be deployed in 25 minutes,” Mana said. Once the Brink App is downloaded, the device automatically becomes an “intelligent SD-WAN router and deny-all firewall.”

The software is deployed in the customer’s cloud environment or data center. Mana claims testing has shown significant improvements for video, SaaS apps, and “anything else the user needs to access." It also provides a secure end-to-end connection built on a dark network and zero-trust network access (ZTNA) functionality.

The Brink App leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to build out networks using Cloudbrink’s infrastructure, which Mana said is “exponentially larger and denser than any of the traditional networks.” Cloudbrink counts thousands of points-of-presence (PoPs), and by next year will have tens of thousands, he added, with the company’s infrastructure running on tier-one or tier-two clouds.

The moment a user downloads Brink App, the application will match their device to the closest enterprise access points, which Cloudbrink calls “fast edges.”

“Our goal is to have you never be more than seven to 20 milliseconds away from the edge,” Mana explained. “This is significantly better than if you go to a data center, where you're 300 milliseconds away. Even if you are in the cloud in one of these PoPs from one of these providers, you're still 70-ish milliseconds away on an average.”

Mana reiterated that unlike many traditional SD-WANs, the HAaaS networking architecture enables a “per user, per app, per flow optimization,” meaning devices can connect to Cloudbrink’s edges and create different paths as users access multiple applications.

Cloudbrink’s fast edges concept also allows the solution to work on last mile and access mile networks, Mana said, which unlocks preemptive and accelerated packet recovery.

SD-WANs depend on multiple broadband links, Mana explained. But if you don't have multiple broadband links, SD-WAN will not be able to provide the link bonding needed to recover packets quickly.

While Comcast only guarantees 90% reliable connection, just 1% packet drop for a TCP throughput of 100 Mb/s link will come down to 16 Mb/s, which Mana said can be a “major productivity killer.”

“That's where you need to leverage the power of AI,” he added, indicating the company is recovering an average of nearly one million packets daily.

Despite the touted advantages, Mana said the platform is not an “SD-WAN killer,” because it doesn’t replace everything SD-WAN does for branch connectivity. But the access and end-user connectivity piece is what SD-WAN vendors “have failed to deliver” – unless IT departments are up for the challenge of installing twin connections and a hefty home router for every user.

SD-WAN architectures were built with a mindset that the “underlay network is done,” Mana said, and with a mission of creating an overlay network that is “slightly more intelligent.”

Mana argues that Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure combined are exponentially bigger than telcos and traditional service providers, and with a better, more intelligent underlay available, there is no longer need for optimizing a public internet link. Instead, he said finding the edge closest to wherever a user is sitting, taking them off of public networks, and riding the hyperscalers' ultra-low latency link backbones is an “architecturally different approach to deliver that in-office performance to that end-user.”

This approach, Mana added, makes managing complex multi-cloud connectivity, device posture assessment, single sign-on IDP, and any multi-factor authentication (MFA), easier.

“That's where Cloudbrink comes in. We extend that stack. It is not a legacy traditional technology sort of force fit into the new world,” he said. “We're purpose built.