Koch Industries has initially deployed the combined offering of Alkira’s Cloud Services Exchange (CSX) and Palo Alto Networks VM-Series Virtual Next-Generation Firewalls to securely extend its enterprise infrastructure into the cloud.

Alkira is a Palo Alto Networks Emerging Technology Partner.

Koch Industries’ global business required greater agility from its complex network infrastructure to respond quickly to its business needs across the globe. The company has deployed Alkira to rebuild parts of its cloud network backbone and transform its network infrastructure into a multi-cloud service on demand, fully integrated with Palo Alto Networks VM-Series virtual firewalls for protection against advanced network-based threats.

Palo Alto Networks Panorama further provides consistent security policy and firewall management across all Alkira deployed VM-Series instances.

Koch’s extremely large and sophisticated network infrastructure included seven global networks supporting thousands of applications, with tens of thousands of access points, hundreds of thousands of switch ports, and thousands of routers and switches, at over 700 sites.

According to the company, it takes the Koch team only minutes to configure Alkira’s network cloud and Palo Alto Networks VM-Series firewalls, and less than an hour to provision the solutions.

The entire security network was set up in a few hours. The solution can serve approximately 120,000 Koch employees doing business in more than 70 countries.