Hyperscale networking software company Arrcus Inc. today announced additions to its FlexMCN multi-cloud networking software that are targeted at reducing the cost of moving data out of cloud infrastructure.

The company said its Egress Cost Control feature can cut those charges, called egress fees, by up to 40%. Egress fees have long been a point of contention between cloud providers and their customers.

Cloud providers typically don’t charge their customers to upload data to the cloud but levy fees for moving data back on-premises or to another cloud. Although the charges are only a few cents per gigabyte, they can add up to thousands of dollars for large datasets.

Arrcus said the costs would become more burdensome as organizations adopt bandwidth-hungry applications such as distributed large language models for generative artificial intelligence, database replication and high-performance computing. It cited a recent report by Gartner Inc. that said egress fees “can be hard to spot because they are scattered throughout a cloud bill and attached to different types of cloud resources.” Cloud architectures that use data replication can also generate egress charges automatically with the customer being aware of them, the research firm said.

FlexMCN, which consists of a secure control and data plane element and an orchestrator, provides enhanced visibility and optimization through smarter routing to enable organizations to minimize egress costs that can add up to 15% to the total cloud computing bill, the company said. It added that ECC dynamically and intelligently routes traffic to destinations with the lowest egress costs and can be used across all dedicated or shared underlay connections in hybrid, colocation and public cloud environments. The service works with direct, colocation and internet connections.

“We can help customers choose the cloud egress points with the lowest egress costs so that the costs incurred in traversing the multicloud environments are reduced,” a spokesman said.

Founded in 2016, Arrcus has raised $138 million in venture funding. It claims to own more than 215 patents on its networking technology.

Image: Arrcus