Lightstorm’s Polarin set to transform the cloud journey of Indian enterprises.
CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Prasanna C, General Manager & Head of Business, Polarin by Lightstorm.
- What are the networking-related challenges faced by Indian enterprises in the cloud era?
The growing adoption of the cloud has led to several challenges for the enterprises. The cloud-based applications and services require extremely high speeds, low latency and higher bandwidth. Unfortunately, the legacy networks are not designed to deliver this kind of performance. In addition, cloud adoption is increasingly leading to a hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure that is complex to manage. What further adds to this is that it is challenging for enterprises to hire and retain cloud talent who are in high demand.
- Elaborate on how NaaS helps enterprises address networking challenges. What are the shortcomings of the traditional MPLS-based network?
Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) offers several crucial advantages. The biggest advantage of using a NaaS platform is that it offers unprecedented speed to set up the network infrastructure. It is also very cost-effective since it effectively turns your capital expenditure into operational expenditure. With a NaaS platform designed for the cloud era, Polarin, it is possible to have your network up and running within a few minutes.
While Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) is a robust technology for legacy applications, it is not designed for the cloud. As enterprises transition to the cloud, they find MPLS to be extremely inflexible and expensive and more importantly, it doesn’t offer any control over the network. In addition, it takes a long time to set up an MPLS network.
- The growing relevance of NaaS in the cloud era?
NaaS makes it easier for enterprises to easily leverage the cloud to grow their business. It allows them to bring down their investments to build networks without compromising on network performance, reliability and security. Polarin is designed for the cloud and provides complete control to enterprises to design and deploy the network as per their particular needs.
- What is Polarin all about? How is it going to impact the Indian enterprise segment?
Polarin was conceived with the idea to help businesses to easily and efficiently manage increasingly complex hybrid and multi-cloud network infrastructure. It not only offers unmatched control to enterprises but allows them to quickly scale as and when required. It is the first-of-its-kind self-serve NaaS platform in India designed to meet the demands of new-age network infrastructure.
We are already helping several Indian enterprises streamline their processes and leverage their network scalability and flexibility to meet their business goals. We believe it will empower Indian businesses to truly benefit from the cloud to enhance operational efficiency and improve network economics.
- What are your future plans? What are the new products/features you are working on?
Over the next few years, we will be adding new features to Polarin and we will be growing our partner ecosystem. Regarding the road ahead for Polarin, we are looking at expanding, both geographically across countries beyond India, as there is a very strong demand for these services across emerging markets, from the Middle East to South East Asia.
We would be continuously adding more ecosystem partners – technology solution providers into our marketplace where it isn’t just the clouds or CDNs, but people can extend their Polarin connectivity service even to various private cloud applications, SaaS applications etc that are very popular in the respective markets.
We are constantly working with early adopters across enterprise verticals and also with key tech partners so that we are able to deliver the best technology solutions that match the need of the hour.
- Tell us a bit about Lightstorm and its journey. How is Lightstorm developing digital infrastructure for enterprises?
Lightstorm was formed in 2020 with the endeavor to transform the digital networking space. Enterprises in emerging economies like India use networks designed for retail customers which are not geared to address their particular requirements of ultra-high-speeds, low latency, extreme availability, scalability and reliability. We have come up with several products to address the problems faced by enterprises in a holistic manner.
To begin with, we are building SmartNet, a utility-grade fiber network connecting key economic hubs in the country. The network in India is being used by some of the biggest hyperscalers and enterprises. We launched SmartNet in Indonesia last year and soon would be launching in other countries in South East Asia.
Polarin uses the foundation of resilient SmartNet to provide 100% uptime, low latency and the highest levels of network performance. In addition, as the demand for bandwidth continues to grow, we are in the process of building a network of Open Cable Landing Stations (CLS) to provide diverse routes and open networks. We would be landing TEAS cable in India in collaboration with Cinturion.
- What are the trends in enterprise networking?
There are two-three trends that stand out. First is the growing adoption of the cloud. The recent NASSCOM-Oliver Wyman report says that the cloud will account for 8% of India’s GDP by 2026 and will create 14 million jobs. The new businesses are cloud-native or have adopted a cloud-first approach, and large enterprises are transitioning towards multi-cloud adoption.
The second major trend is that of network automation. The growing complexity of the cloud and increasingly diverse network is pushing enterprises to use AI/ML tools to automate and simplify network operations for ease of management.
Increasingly businesses are demanding a network that is not just easy to manage but also puts user experience at the center of its design. Typically enterprise network management includes several tools from different vendors. Integrating them is a challenge as the network complexity grows. A Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) solution helps in addressing these challenges while keeping the costs under control.
- Apart from NaaS, what are your other key focus areas in the Indian enterprise?
We would be building a network of open CLS that will open up the bottleneck in the international traffic when it comes to the country, allowing enterprises to benefit a lot more in terms of enabling India as the gateway whilst also enabling multi-national corporates to seamlessly connect to international geographies.
Other than Polarin, we also have a SmartNet offering from Lightstorm, which caters to hyperscale network requirements for enterprises in the country. We are continuously expanding our footprint beyond Tier I cities and this is also in line with the movement of the edge penetration, where the data is moving closer to the users.
