Cradlepoint CMO Todd Krautkremer

Cradlepoint has announced NetCloud Exchange, an extension of its NetCloud service designed to help IT teams address the intersection of 5G, SD-WAN, and zero-trust networking.   

The NetCloud service is a software platform that supports wireless WAN delivered through 4G LTE and 5G wireless edge routers. The new NetCloud Exchange extension delivers three products – Secure Connect, Advanced SD-WAN, and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) – using the NetCloud Exchange Service Gateway.

“Everything we've built so far at Cradlepoint, all the sales that we've had that have generated multiple hundreds of millions of dollars, really have been edge products that sit at the edge and it's all they do,” Cradlepoint CMO Todd Krautkremer told SDxCentral. “What NetCloud Exchange does is it extends NetCloud now to two sides, so we're going end-to-end."

Krautkremer said the Secure Connect product can be thought of as “a modern cloud zero-trust type of VPN.” 

“You get an end-to-end connection setup that's designed to be massively scalable, and it's built in with zero trust,” he added. 

Krautkremer explained the Secure Connect product “completely cloaks the internet” using network-based addressing, meaning there are no publicly routable addresses. “Instead of VPN today, where you log on to the VPN and you have access to everything, now you are very secure and can control what you log into,” he said. 

NetCloud Exchange’s Secure Connect and Service Gateway are available now, while the SD-WAN and ZTNA products will be available in the fourth quarter of this year.

When available, the SD-WAN product will enable features like 5G network slicing, simplified configuration at scale, and more advanced cloud integration, while the ZTNA product leverages identity, context, and 5G attributes to control network access.  

The NetCloud Exchange products are meant to be easy to configure and scale out, “to provide the same type of capabilities an enterprise does but with dramatically less effort and dramatically less configuration," Krautkremer said. “It's very much focused on lean IT shops."

Ericsson acquired Cradlepoint in 2020, with the combination focused on the wireless WAN and 5G markets.

Krautkremer said the NetCloud Exchange products are ideal for organizations that “have already embraced wireless as essential infrastructure.” He added that expanding the role of wireless with 5G has been a key Cradlepoint strategy since its acquisition. 

Big players like Cisco and Fortinet, Krautkremer noted, have all started honing in on the transition to wireless WAN. “That's a category now. It's been endorsed by the competition,” he said. Cradlepoint rival Inseego recently added cloud-management and increased security capabilities to its enterprise-focused networking services, underscoring the proliferating market push toward integrating 5G technology into SD-WAN edge devices.

“5G is unlike any other 'G' that preceded it because enterprises will come into the fold. Enterprises will see the value of 5G and embrace it if the carriers have the right data plans and do the right things,” Krautkremer said. “Well, the carriers are doing the right things, and the enterprise customers are embracing it."