Aviatrix’s New Distributed Cloud Firewall Is Saving One AWS Customer $6M A Year

“One of the taglines we have is, ‘Save a lot of money. Improve your Security,’” says Aviatrix President and CEO Steve Mullaney. “People – especially now in the recession- are coming back and telling us you had me at saving money. They are all getting mandated to cut cloud costs, some by as much as 30 percent.”

Aviatrix is saving a large Amazon Web Services customer $6 million a year by replacing AWS NAT gateways with the new Aviatrix Distributed Cloud Firewall, said Aviatrix President and CEO Steve Mullaney.

The cost savings comes from the reduced cost of moving traffic through the new Aviatrix Distributed Cloud Firewall rather than through the NAT (Network Address Translation) gateway with AWS NAT service charges ringing up as network traffic flows through the gateway, said Mullaney.

“When you distribute it and you are not moving traffic around, you are not incurring data charges with AWS,” said Mullaney. “With Distributed Cloud Firewall you now have distributed functionality into the fabric of the network. It’s just like with distributed processing. Every position in the network is now adding processing power to what logically looks like one big giant firewall.”

CRN reached out to AWS for a response but had not heard back at press time.

The Aviatrix Distributed Cloud Firewall – which was announced on Thursday and is already shipping - redefines the economics of cloud computing both in public clouds like AWS and Azure and for traditional network firewalls, said Mullaney.

“Now you can do small (cloud) instances because the amount of traffic each one of those individually has to do is not that great because it is distributed,” he said. “What made it difficult was how do you create that distributed system and make it operate and look like one (giant firewall)?”

That breakthrough took Aviatrix engineers two to three years, said Mullaney. “All of our engineers are from Google,” he said. “We have all Google guys. These are all Istio (programmable, application aware network service mesh) and Kubernetes guys. They understand distributed systems. They are not box guys. Most firewall people all their engineers are box people. They don’t know how to build a distributed system. That’s a Google world.”

Mullaney said his company’s initial go-to-market sales motion is aimed at the AWS cost savings scenario. “That is like a hot knife through butter,” he said. “It’s easy. Who doesn’t want to save a lot of money and have better security? Everybody.”

Customers are anxious to take advantage of the cost savings that come with the new Aviatrix Distributed Cloud Firewall, said Mullaney.

“One of the taglines we have is, “Save a lot of money. Improve your Security,” said Mullaney. “People – especially now in the recession- are coming back and telling us you had me at saving money. They are all getting mandated to cut cloud costs, some by as much as 30 percent. Customers are telling us they have to optimize their cloud. We go in and tell them we can optimize your cloud costs and improve your security. That’s a winning combination.”

Mullaney said that AWS is teaming with Aviatrix to run campaigns to identify more customers that can save money with the new Aviatrix Distributed Cloud Firewall. “You know what’s interesting is AWS is helping us,” he said. We are jointly running a campaign because AWS has a customer for life mentality which means ‘I need to help you save money on AWS!’ It is actually smart on their part. Because if they do that what is the customer going to say: ‘I need to stay with you forever!’”

John Bristol, a secure cloud and modern networking specialist for Enterprise Vision Technologies, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based disruptive digital transformation solution provider, said he sees the ability for customers to save up to 30 percent in an AWS cloud environment when implementing an Aviatrix Distributed Cloud Firewall. “NAT gateways are extremely expensive,” he said. “There are egress charges. There is hairpinning (where traffic goes out to the internet but makes a hairpin turn).”

There are also instances where customers incur egress charges with data crossing into different regions, said Bristol. “With these hidden charges it is hard to peel back the onion on where those costs are,” he said.

Bristol praised Aviatrix’s CostIQ product which provides cloud cost intelligence to customers. “That gives you visibility into the traffic and who is using what so you are no longer peanut butter spreading traffic across your business units,” he said.

That CostIQ capability provides the ability to provide charge backs to individual business units, said Bristol. “With CostIQ you are seeing very packet,” he said. “That is a use case for some of the opportunities we are in.”

Enterprise Vision Technologies, which has a strong Fortune 100 customer base using AWS cloud services, is getting customers to look more closely at cloud cost savings by replacing AWS NAT gateways, said Bristol. “We’re coming to the table saying you don’t need that high cost NAT gateway,” he said. “We are showing them how they can save money. It is really giving them visibility, understanding and awareness. It is definitely resonating.”

Bristol said he sees conservatively a $4.5 billion potential market opportunity to help AWS customers save money with Aviatrix Distributed Cloud Firewall.

“It’s exciting,” he said.