Chart Industries turns to NaaS to solve multicloud merger challenge

The expansion of multicloud and increasing workload complexity have some IT organizations rethinking networking for a new era.

While some enterprises have dedicated cloud networking experts in house to handle the nuances of interconnecting multiple cloud, others are partnering with consulting firms to tackle global interconnectivity issues. And some are tapping into specialized service providers to insulate them from multicloud networking challenges altogether.

When Ball Ground, Ga.-based Chart Industries acquired UK-based Howden in March 2023, the $6-plus billion manufacturer of liquefied gas equipment elevated its number of multicloud sites globally to more than 130 from 40. To simplify cloud deployment and enable global connectivity efficiently, Chart decided to transform its network infrastructure, enlisting Alkira’s networking-as-a-service (NaaS) to expedite the task.

With Howden, which provides mission-critical air and gas handling products and services, Chart gained myriad local on-premises resources and has been working on the integration for about a year. Alkira’s multicloud NaaS enabled Chart to absorb 90 sites in a fraction of the time it would have taken the IT staff to integrate each individual site’s cloud networking variances and annoyances, says Susan Tlacil, a network architect at Chart Industries.

“The biggest benefit is for mergers and acquisitions,” she says. “We were able to take this new company that we bought and join them to our cloud backbone very rapidly. As we go through M&A, not only can we merge Google Cloud with [Microsoft] Azure and AWS cloud, but we can also merge [cloud] tenants. They’re all one network and all on one segment.”

With Alkira’s services, Chart’s IT chief and networking staff did not have to worry about connectivity headaches or exporting massive amounts of Office 365 documents from one acquisition into its Azure hub. Chart did not have to upskill the staff or hire more networking engineers to untangle each site’s unique cloud networking architecture.

“It allows us to focus on networking instead of ramping up our knowledge of cloud network management,” says Tlacil, one of roughly 50 IT pros at Chart Industries. “One of the challenges for us was that Azure, AWS, and Google all have different networking languages. Alkira shields us from that.”

Chart, which has been migrating to Azure over the past five years, has roughly 50% of its services in the cloud. It adds more every week even as it considers a multicloud future. The provider of services and equipment for cryogenic gas liquefaction has a wide range of on-prem IT assets and multicloud assets to manage due to its expansive liquefied gas business, which includes oil and natural gas creation and storage, hydrogen and nitrogen gas products, and bread-and-butter carbon dioxide tanks for retail customers such as Chick-fil-A.

Chart is also developing a possible solution for liquid cooling data centers, a major concern for the IT industry as data centers built specifically for AI pop up across the world. The existing electrical and natural gas power grid may not be sufficient for powering and cooling data centers filled with Nvidia’s chips and future AI processors.

Easing the merger workload

Chart initially began working with Alkira to provide remote management for its customers’ use of Chart storage equipment in the field, which requires maintenance and safety checks. Managing the connection of IP-based IoT devices and equipment to virtual private networks was a major time saver, Tlacil says.

“In order to build that infrastructure ourselves, we would have had to deploy a lot of hardware and have had to have a software developer build a front end, and that probably would have taken us between three and six months,” she says.

Alkira’s virtual private network service did that for Chart in three days. Since then, Chart has expanded its partnership with Alkira to help assimilate the Howden acquisition sites. Chart has a close partnership with its core backbone provider, Cisco, but opted for Alkira’s additive networking service to connect the many multicloud sites on almost every continent.

John Burke, CTO of IT consultancy Nemertes, who is familiar with Chart’s partnership with Alkira, says Alkira’s multicloud networking services gave Chart Industries a high level of simplicity, consistency, agility, and reliability.

“The fact that their multicloud network got a common look and feel and consistent set of behaviors across all cloud platforms, regions, and environments, combined with easy automation and the as-a-service offloading of the need for deep platform-specific expertise and platform maintenance and upgrade chores, meant Chart saw vast reductions in the staff effort and calendar time needed to deploy and maintain those networks, and got big improvements in reliability as well,” he says.

There was a time when CIOs did not have to give much thought to networking, but the cloud has changed that. ISVs such as Alkira, Aviatrix, and Cato Networks offer various additive networking services, Burke says. Cato Networks is a NaaS provider with a security focus while Alkira specializes in providing unified global multicloud networking (MCN).

Andre Kindness, principal analyst of networking at Forrester Research, says Alkira walks a line between secure access service edge (SASE) and MCN.

“The company is addressing networking and security challenges of connecting remote offices, public cloud platforms, and private data centers, [and] is unique in that regard,” Kindness says. “MCNs only deal with multiple public clouds. SASE only deals with remote offices and employees. I have not seen any vendor deal with private data centers and connections to public cloud and remote offices like Alkira is doing.”

Chart will likely continue making acquisitions as it explores new businesses, such as liquid cooling of data centers. Other observers point to potential use of NaaS and multicloud networking for automating generative AI and agentic AI workloads.

Tlacil says she is interested in the possibility of Alkira connecting all of Chart’s terrestrial data centers with its cloud data centers for disaster recovery, especially in the event of a cloud outage.

She is also dreaming of real-time data replication of multi-cloud networks.

“That way, when an outage occurs, I can fail over. That is where I would like to go with network as a service — network infrastructure that can be extrapolated to any service, wherever it is. So right now, we can do all of that with the clouds. The next step is to do those in managed data centers,” she says.