Redvine Networks is looking to leverage continued growth within Africa’s datacentre construction market and has outlined its strategy to accelerate the roll out of SD-WAN gateway technology, a critical component of ensuring sensitive cloud data does not cross borders.
SD-WAN integrates edge, gateway, and orchestrator technologies to ensure the optimal delivery of data between organisations and their cloud service providers. Gateways are deployed at datacentres to optimise traffic paths for assured performance and provide security services like firewalls.
Redvine has implemented its gateways in Botswana, Kenya, Lesotho, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe in Africa, and in the UK and Italy in Europe.
Binesh George, founder and CEO at Redvine Networks, says the company uses cloud instances hosted in multiple datacentres to run its PoPs across Africa. “The state is developed in certain countries, but for many others there is still a lot of opportunity for growth in this sector as there aren’t really that many carrier / provider agnostic centres. This then allows us as a SDN provider to push for multiple provider last mile options as part of our service offerings the new and existing base. With infrastructure technology trending more toward more efficient and cost effective virtual instances, we are looking to capitalise on this by partnering with key datacentres in Africa.”
George adds, “Expanding these gateways is a critical building block to provide good application performance to customers in Africa. This sees cloud traffic for sensitive customer and corporate data remain in-country as opposed to travelling to datacentres in South Africa and Europe as has often been the case.”
Protecting data sovereignty
Redvine Networks prioritises the protection of access to data and its service offerings remain compliant with standards, including POPIA, GDPR, PCI DSS and ICSA lab certifications, he says. The expectation is that within five years every country will have something in place to legislate and assure data residency.
“We are already addressing the challenge of protecting the sovereignty of our customer traffic and data with our service offerings. These gateways that we are [adding], enable us to localise and protect data on a per country/enterprise level,” says George.
“We started the deployment of these powerful software-driven gateways three years ago primarily to drive application and data performance for organisations. Subsequently, more applications and services have started being hosted in the public cloud. putting pressure on regulators to make sure data is kept in country. With gateway technology in place, Redvine is in a position to not only deliver public cloud services, but also help with data privacy requirements,” he adds George.
The SD-WAN gateway technology enables Redvine partners to rapidly deploy and connect other sites without needing to overhaul the hardware infrastructure already in place. By delivering secure connectivity from customer premises to the gateway, Redvine makes it possible for partners to deliver the performance assurance essential on cloud applications for their customers.
Flexible service offerings
George says the company has presence in Southern, East and West Africa, and works with key service provider partners that place a premium on mutual benefit. “We benefit from leveraging their underlay network and they benefit from our technology, enhancing the experience across their network as well as allowing for more flexible service offerings like converged networking, security and endpoint access.”
“For Redvine, it is all about equipping our fast-growing partner network with modern technology and the ability to enable new services in the cloud. Effectively, they are leveraging infrastructure to deliver managed cloud services to customers.”
George adds that while a significant amount of innovation is happening in Africa, the technology is more mature in Europe due to its adoption. However, he believes software-based innovation as delivered through these gateways will see countries across the continent overcome infrastructure challenges.
They now get the capabilities to expand feature sets using the software on top of the physical infrastructure.
“Since our offerings are primarily software-driven, we do offer these from hybrid and multicloud environments both locally and globally. These are offered and redundant across multiple IAAS providers. We already have several multi-national customers successfully running our solutions in both multi-cloud and hybrid environments.”
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