Shaping the Future of Connectivity: An Inside Look at Lightstorm's Vision

In an exclusive interview with Voice&Data, Prasanna C,  Global Head of Products at Lightstorm, reveals how their innovative Network as a Service (NaaS) platform, Polarin, is transforming modern businesses.

He highlights Polarin's key features, including its high visibility, unmatched scalability, and zero-touch provisioning, which address contemporary networking challenges. Prasanna also discusses the future trends in network infrastructure, particularly edge networking, and shares Lightstorm's strategies to remain a technological leader in the rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Excerpts:

How does Network as a Service (NaaS) address modern networking challenges for businesses?

Network as a Service (NaaS) addresses modern networking challenges faced by enterprises by providing businesses with flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency. Lightstorm's mission has always been to bridge the gap between the agility of the cloud and the sluggishness of traditional networks, and the success of our Polarin NaaS platform is a testament to our commitment to fulfilling that mission.

Businesses turn to the cloud due to its flexibility and agility, and they need high-bandwidth, low-latency network connections in order to leverage the power of the cloud. However, the traditional network provisioning environment creates a bottleneck in this process due to its inflexibility, and time-consuming nature setting off the allure of the cloud. Current traditional NaaS offerings available in the market fail to address these challenges further restricting agility.

Amongst the suite of interconnection services available on Polarin, Polarin DCI Wave, our latest offering, emerges as a groundbreaking solution to this pain point. It's the industry's first NaaS for high-bandwidth optical networks, specifically designed to eliminate the limitations of traditional provisioning methods. With these solutions enterprises can provision the cloud network within minutes, drastically reducing the time it used to take earlier.

Can you provide practical insights into innovative solutions and their impact on enterprise connectivity?

Lightstorm is a trailblazer in network connectivity space. We are leading the way in innovation by revolutionising how businesses connect to the cloud through our solutions such as Polarin.  In short, these innovative solutions empower businesses to connect to the cloud efficiently, enabling them to serve their customers better. 

Let us take the examples of companies like Zepto, a quick commerce platform, and Phone Pe, a leading payment aggregator. In order to handle a surge in orders during peak hours, they need to instantly scale their network resources for seamless delivery of services. In such scenarios, NaaS (Network-as-a-Service) dynamically adjust their bandwidth according to demand fluctuation. This not only ensures high-speed, low-latency connection but also saves the businesses money and eliminates wastage of resources.

What are the key features of Polarin that set it apart in the NaaS market?

Polarin is Lightstorm's flagship pay-as-you-go Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) platform, offering flexible and scalable network solutions tailored to modern enterprise needs. It provides an intuitive platform that allows businesses to provision and manage their network resources instantly and efficiently. With its cloud-centric and elastic networking experience, Polarin stands out as one of the few true NaaS providers globally. 

Polarin distinguishes itself from other NaaS products available in the market in the following ways:

High degree of visibility: With a fully functional dashboard, enterprises can gain comprehensive real-time visibility on key network metrics and performance that allow network teams to identify issues and opportunities, empowering informed decisions, faster troubleshooting, and optimising the cost.

Unmatched scalability: Polarin effortlessly scales bandwidth-on-demand to adapt to changing business needs. Businesses can scale whenever they deem fit; its point-click-consume model eliminates the underutilisation of resources and reduces cost. With bandwidths ranging from 10 Mbps to 100 Gbps, Polarin offers businesses the option to scale granularly depending on business needs.

Zero-touch provisioning: Polarin automates provisioning in a few minutes, reducing the lengthy time and cost associated with traditional provisioning methods.

How does Polarin ensure flexibility and adaptability to meet the growing demand for automation and scalability in businesses?

Today’s growing businesses look for automation and smart solutions for minimising costs and improving efficiency. Polarin platform offers flexibility and adaptability with its agile and dynamic network solution that meets the changing business needs of enterprises.

Polarin’s pay-as-you-go model helps businesses to utilise the network resources on demand offering the flexibility to pay based on usage in response to demand fluctuations. Its intuitive dashboard gives access to scale the resources up or down with a click of a button. It drastically reduces the cost for the organisations.

Through its dashboard, network teams can have a centralised view of the real-time network performance and essential metrics which enables them to monitor and manage the network environment, facilitating faster decision-making and troubleshooting.

Polarin has revolutionised the NaaS with its capability of instant provisioning, eliminating the need for manual setup. From connecting DCs, Clouds, CDN & IXPs, these connections can be set in minutes on Layer 2/3. We’ve automated the connection to DCs on Layer 1 as well. This automation is powered by robotic arms strategically deployed to automate optical network connectivity over 63 data centers in India.

It’s common practice among enterprises to move workloads across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. Polarin's NaaS platform enables easy, point-and-click provisioning of virtual networks across multiple cloud providers (Azure, AWS, Oracle, Google Cloud) via 60+ data centers and cloud on-ramps in India. Businesses can centrally manage and monitor data flows through a unified portal.

What future developments or enhancements are planned for Polarin to better serve Indian businesses?

We partner with forward-looking companies to boost and strengthen our existing offerings. Integrating cutting-edge technological solutions from our partners and our expertise in networking, we are continuously enhancing our portfolio of products. 

First, of its kind in the telecom industry, Polarin DCI Wave is a revolutionary solution that utilises robotic arms to automate the entire layer 1 connectivity process and give control to customers. Through this technology enterprises and hyperscalers can self-provision optical layer connectivity in under 10 minutes across more than 60 of the top data centers in India.

Another newest addition to our portfolio is Polarin Network Edge (PNE), it integrates compute, internet, and private network resources at the edge, creating a unified solution that enhances performance, reduces latency, and improves overall efficiency.

Polarin’s recent listing on AWS Marketplace and Azure Marketplace underscores Lightstorm’s commitment to driving innovation and delivering superior cloud connectivity solutions to businesses worldwide.

Our strategic collaboration with Console Connect facilitates seamless cloud and network connectivity to enterprise customers globally across 180+ data centers. The integration between Polarin by Lightstorm and Console Connect creates a single platform for all connectivity needs that guarantees increased reliability, high availability, and redundancy measures to ensure the uninterrupted operation of customers' applications.

What are the future prospects and trends in network infrastructure, especially in the context of digital transformation?

As digital transformation accelerates, several key trends are shaping the future of network infrastructure. One major trend set to gain momentum is edge networking. The factor driving this trend is Edge computing, which brings computation and data storage closer to the source of data generation, and is becoming increasingly important. Edge computing utilises the network edge for complex operations, enhancing performance and user experience.

To keep pace with this trend, we launched Polarin Network Edge (PNE). PNE brings together compute, internet, and private network resources at the edge, empowering businesses to use their preferred virtual network functions (from any vendor) and seamlessly connect to Polarin NaaS. This solution simplifies the management of core network needs, including connections to data centers (DCs), disaster recovery (DR) sites, and multiple cloud platforms.

What strategies does Lightstorm have to stay at the forefront of innovation and technological advancements in the networking industry?

Since its inception in 2020, Lightstorm has consistently been at the forefront of innovation, pioneering solutions to complex network connectivity challenges. By continuously investing in network infrastructure, we are leading India’s digital transformation journey. We constantly upgraded our existing solutions, keeping pace with the changing needs of customers. Lightstorm has cultivated a thriving partner ecosystem by collaborating with industry leaders, combining our mutual strengths and expertise to deliver cutting-edge solutions to our customers. 

We recently unveiled Polarin DCI Wave- an industry first solution in which enterprises, and hyper-scalers, for the first time in the world, can self-provision optical layer connectivity in under 10 minutes across more than 60 of the top data centers in India.

Venturing forward, we’ve made a global network fabric interconnecting DCs across Emerging (India, Indonesia, Thailand, UAE) and Developed (US, JP, EU) markets. Global Enterprises will benefit from using a global DCI network that connects 180+ DCs globally on-demand.