Inside Michaels’ Three-Week Shift to NIaaS with Alkira

Enterprises are looking to modernize their cloud and networking infrastructure without heavy hardware investment or protracted rollout cycles. They are adopting new "as-a-service" models to accelerate connectivity and reduce operational complexity.

In customer environments validated by Futuriom, including Michaels, this approach can enable rapid deployment at retail scale while lowering both capital and operational costs. Alkira’s Network Infrastructure-as-a-Service (NIaaS) model shifts networking from capex-heavy builds to an operational model and can be stood up rapidly without customers deploying new hardware or software. It can be used to build global infrastructure in less than one hour.

In a Futuriom exclusive, we dug deep to examine Alkira’s deployment at Michaels, one of North America’s largest arts and crafts retailers. Michaels used the Alkira Platform to extend secure connectivity from approximately 1,400 stores across the U.S. and Canada into cloud applications with minimal disruption and in a compressed timeframe.

How Alkira Works

To support large, distributed enterprises, Alkira provides a cloud-delivered network platform built on a global footprint of Cloud Exchange Points (CXPs). The service abstracts public cloud infrastructure, private datacenters, and SD-WAN into a single operational layer, allowing connectivity and security policies to be deployed consistently across locations.

This model, a modern evolution of software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN), has attracted enterprises seeking to move away from hardware-intensive networking while improving access to cloud services. For Michaels, it offered a way to modernize its network, reduce reliance on private datacenters, and extend secure connectivity from stores directly into Google Cloud at national scale.

Why Alkira Appealed to Michaels

As Michaels prepared for peak holiday demand, the company needed a network that could support its large retail footprint while reducing dependence on private datacenter infrastructure. Previous outages tied to proprietary datacenter equipment had disrupted operations and resulted in lost sales, prompting the team to look for a more resilient and scalable approach.

The company was already shifting more workloads to Google Cloud as part of a broader modernization effort. According to Sreenu Sampati, Director of Security Engineering at Michaels, eliminating redundant backhaul to private datacenters was a primary objective. To support that shift, Michaels used Alkira to establish secure connections from stores directly into Google Cloud by deploying Cloud Exchange Points to connect GCP with Michaels’ 1400 retail locations.

After validating the approach in a small number of stores, Michaels concluded it offered a more reliable and cost-effective alternative to the legacy model. As Sampati explained, reliance on datacenter-based networking had become a growing operational risk.

“We couldn’t afford to have that happen again. Everything was backhauling to the datacenter. You can’t have everything depend on the datacenter. Within a rapid amount of time, we needed to deploy 1,400 stores with connectivity to GCP," Sampati told Alkira CEO Amir Khan in video interviews about outages with traditional network models.