Cloudflare has announced its acquisition of multicloud networking vendor Nefeli Networks in a move to help networking functions keep up with the pace of applications in the cloud.

Cloudflare customers have been vocal about the struggles of managing both the network and security aspects of their cloud environments. “The problem they described most frequently was that as applications shifted to the cloud, networking functions had lagged behind,” Cloudflare Director of Product Management Annika Garbers told SDxCentral.

Public cloud providers like Microsoft, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have small sets of capabilities available for network teams to define, connect and secure their cloud infrastructure, but they have been slow to integrate capabilities for enterprise network use cases, and they have not standardized their object model with other clouds.

As a result, enterprises migrating to the cloud experience high administrative overhead and a lack of support for advanced functionality, according to Garbers.

Managing the same services and applications on multiple clouds creates extra work for IT teams in creating, maintaining and executing infrastructure changes. “It also requires specialization in multiple clouds’ network stacks, which is hard to find,” she said.

Instead, some enterprises pay systems integrators to get past these hurdles. But that still leaves “a mountain of maintenance work after the initial cloud migration,” she said.

And since public cloud providers didn’t jump to address shortcomings in native networking services, networking functions like encrypted peering, BGP route approval and high bandwidth support that enterprises needed to migrate legacy deployments didn’t exist.

Rather than give up on migration, enterprise IT teams turned to virtual versions of networking hardware to mirror the environments they were familiar with in legacy data centers. But this created substantial technical debt and an increased need for systems integrators to manage these environments. That’s where the multicloud networking market emerged.

As public cloud providers began integrating native networking functionalities, Nefeli took a new approach to multicloud networking, which made the vendor an attractive acquisition target for Cloudflare.

Nefeli relies on the APIs provided by public cloud providers to build a unified abstraction layer across native cloud constructs. This layer provides multicloud network management and operations without the need to deploy or manage separate virtualized network functions.

Nefeli’s value proposition rang true with what Cloudflare is already doing at its edge “to manage functions that can be shifted away from the customer network,” rendering “Nefeli’s technology the ideal fit to integrate into the Cloudflare platform,” Garbers said.

The acquisition of Nefeli Networks bolsters Cloudflare’s network services portfolio with the ability for customers to have “greater control and visibility out of their cloud environments,” Garbers said. “This integration positions Cloudflare to help businesses discover, connect and protect any private or public cloud environment.”

The companies did not disclose the financial terms of the deal.

The Nefeli acquisition is key to Cloudflare’s new Magic Cloud Networking platform, which the vendor announced in tandem with the deal.

Cloudflare’s Magic Cloud Networking service is worthy of that adjective based on customer feedback, according to Garbers. The three main components of the magic are a unified platform, easy deployment and management, and the vendor’s global network.

The networking service’s unified platform gives customers one destination for managing the network, compared to other vendors’ “disconnected point solutions,” Garbers said. And the platform’s ease of use and the range of Cloudflare’s network eliminates the tradeoff between performance and security, she said.

This natural extension of Cloudflare’s existing product portfolio is expected to positively impact the vendor’s market position, especially as companies continue to pursue vendor consolidation.

In today’s “sprawling landscape of networking and security tools, our goal is to make Cloudflare an easy choice by offering all the capabilities customers need to connect and secure their networks in one place,” Garbers said.

“Cloudflare is the only vendor today with a comprehensive [security service edge] platform, network connectivity powered by our global footprint and backbone and industry-leading application and network security for public resources,” she said. “Adding multicloud networking into our product portfolio reinforces our positioning as the one-stop shop for customers.”