How Cloudbrink Is Planning to Make Remote Work Better
The network makes or breaks a remote employee’s work experience. Having the deepest catalog of the greatest software tools for your workers won’t make a difference if their connections to your enterprise network are unreliable, but ensuring that flawless connectivity is deeply challenging: especially since remote workers tend to change locations in unpredictable ways.
Cloudbrink, an Equinix customer, is taking on this challenge with an innovative solution based on dedicated cloud infrastructure and edge networking. It promises to be a disruptor in the work-anywhere era, and here's its story.
In the words of Prakash Mana, Cloudbrink’s co-founder and CEO, the mission is straightforward: "Our goal is to deliver an in-office-like digital experience to hybrid workers, no matter where they are based."
That's a big deal, given that more than 50 percent of employees in the US who can work remotely do so–at least part time according to Gallup. For these employees, having the freedom to work from wherever they wish, while still enjoying a flawless digital experience, has become a cornerstone of job satisfaction.
For businesses, however, delivering a flawless remote worker digital experience can be quite challenging. As almost everyone who has ever attended a laggy video call or struggled to download large files from a remote enterprise server can attest, flaky network connections in remote locations are too often the weakest link in employee productivity and experience.
Historically, there haven't been many enterprises that have been able to solve this problem. The only way to boost network performance for remote employees has been to deploy expensive network infrastructure and routers in the locations where employees might choose to connect from–a proposition that just isn't feasible when you have hundreds or thousands of remote workers and you can never predict exactly where they'll be on any given day.
A new take on SD-WAN
Cloudbrink has a clever strategy for solving this challenge. Its software-based SD-WAN router that can operate on virtually any device. By installing the router on their smartphones or laptops, employees working remotely enjoy the connectivity and security of enterprise-class network routing without depending on expensive, complex physical routers.
We're not talking about a run-of-the-mill software router. The killer feature of Cloudbrink's solution is that it can offload processing to edge servers hosted in Equinix Metal data centers. As a result, the router's capabilities aren't restricted by the hardware resources available on the host device. Nor does it bog down devices. "We aim to keep CPU consumption under 0.5 percent," Mana says.
The end result is an extremely lightweight, flexible SD-WAN routing solution capable of providing enterprise-grade connectivity, role-based access control and zero-trust security anywhere, anytime.
Mana says that its router and architecture can make network speeds up to 30 times faster–a figure that the company's CMO, Graham Melville, admits he found dubious at first. "When Prakash told me about 30x speed improvements, I said it's just not possible," explains Melville, who has a background as a seasoned network engineer and has contributed to the development of 802.11 standards. "But he showed me the results, and I became a believer. I realized that the trick is that we're not providing more bandwidth. We're simply helping people maximize the bandwidth of the connections they already have" through highly efficient routing and edge processing.
Meeting enterprises in the data centers they already use
As mentioned above, Cloudbrink leverages bare metal servers in Equinix Metal’ dedicated cloud to host its edge networking architecture. Metal makes it easy to deploy high-performing dedicated infrastructure across a wide range of locations. This flexibility means that Cloudbrink can deploy instances physically close to users and achieve latency rates as low as 5 milliseconds.
But that's only part of the benefit that Cloudbrink leverages by working with Equinix. Many of the company's enterprise customers already use Equinix data centers to host digital services. By deploying Cloudbrink's Connector app, which exposes services to remote users on the Cloudbrink network, within the same data centers, enterprises enjoy a simple, high-performing means of making their services available everywhere.
"With Equinix, we get a level of flexibility that's just not available on other platforms," says Mana. "This lets us provide an even more seamless experience by working with Equinix to enable joint customers."
Enterprise networking in the coffee shop
It's too early to declare permanent victory over choppy video calls. But thanks to technology like Cloudbrink's, such a world–one where "enterprise networking reaches coffee shops," as Mana puts it–is now envisionable. At Equinix, we're proud to be working with companies like Cloudbrink to enable a better employee experience for remote workers everywhere.
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