As enterprises increasingly adopt a multicloud strategy, networking challenges stand out, including connecting disparate infrastructures, gaining visibility and governance over this complexity, and ensuring security across it all.

Warner Music Group faced these challenges until it turned to network-as-a-service startup Alkira Inc. Because Warner Music’s IT infrastructure was somewhat decentralized, with many of the network and data center components left to the responsibility of the regions, its goal was to build a common, holistic network across its different clouds and across its foreign affiliates.

“One of the challenges was how do we get out of the data center?” said Ralph Munsen (pictured, right), chief information officer of Warner Music. “Cloud was new. One of the big things that was coming was big data, which is absolutely right for moving, going straight to the cloud, especially if you don’t have anything on-prem, and how do we rationalize all of these different locations and conduct all the M&A work we’ve been doing? So it was quite a challenge.”

Munsen and Atif Khan (pictured, left), co-founder and chief technology officer of Alkira, spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed the demands of modern business for a unified global network infrastructure; Alkira’s solutions for this integrated network and end-to-end visibility, controls and governance; and how Warner Music benefitted from its digital transformation. (* Disclosure below.)

Improving M&A integration

In addition to the multicloud strategy increasingly embraced by companies, the COVID-19 pandemic also increased the challenges related to network infrastructure. The network could no longer just connect data centers, but had to link all incoming traffic from people working from home, according to Khan.

“Traffic patterns are from sites or users mostly to the cloud or SaaS applications, so now networks also need to evolve and … be built inside the cloud rather than from outside or connecting into the cloud,” he explained. “Secondly, now it’s not only about connectivity, because security becomes even more important because your security perimeter is changing as well.”

Warner Music saw two main benefits after working with Alkira, according to Munsen. One is enhanced security. The other is improved time-to-market for mergers and acquisitions.

“So, we’re buying a lot more and we’re turning them up and turning those business cases up faster,” Munsen stated. “Usually, those cases [take] things like six months to a year to integrate with us, and then we can unlock the set of benefits. Now it’s more like two to three months.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Alkira Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Alkira nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE