The Transformation of Networking

VOLUME 1 - ISSUE 10 ~ OCTOBER 20, 2023

Enterprise networking is complex - but does it have to be? In this next edition of the "CIO Two Cents" newsletter, I talk about a startup that is simplifying network operations and revolutionizing the industry. Read on for insights from me - Yvette Kanouff, Partner at JC2 Ventures - into what is on the mind of CIOs at this moment in time:

*The JC2 Ventures team (John J. Chambers, Shannon Pina, John T. Chambers, me, and Pankaj Patel)*

I am particularly enamored with Networking as a Service (NaaS). I’m not referring to the kind of service where a company does that hard stuff for you nor to software-defined networking or virtualization – all of these are still highly complex. Rather, I’m excited about the real transformation of networking and how it works, from the core to the customer-facing quality of experience. I look at what the JC2 Ventures-backed startup Nile Secure has done, and it really is next generation in terms of how networks operate from the design up.

Let’s start by thinking of traditional networks. A router or a switch has thousands of features and configurations, and a network can become so complex that network engineers are hired based on the certifications he or she has from networking academies, and how many highly complex networks they have built or managed. Then there are multi-vendor networks, network management systems, analytics and observability systems, cyber add-ons, and so much more. The entire system is complexity on top of complexity. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that over 70% of network downtime is due to configuration errors.

So how does Nile’s NaaS remove the exposure to human error? They do it by having zero network configurations – yes, zero.

No manual configurations, no automated configurations – none. At least in their core. The core is designed to start up and, well, just start working as designed. It is highly aware and self-managing. The old-fashioned concepts of configuring systems are now eliminated –therefore, the engineering of these systems can focus on security, scale, and reliability instead of dealing with configuration-based edge cases.
Around the core is the environment. The environment is interesting – filled with external and built-in sensors, the network can sense power and voltage fluctuations, changes in the RF and auto-discover changes in physical space. It automatically figures out which cable should be changed or if an access point should be moved away from a source of interference or whether the reconfigured space needs AP layout changes. No more human guessing, this system figures out its own needs. This is fun to see in action.
Then surrounding the environment is the context, or customer experience. This is what I love most about this next-generational NaaS – instead of being feature focused, the entire system is customer-experience focused. The context wrapper of the Nile network looks at user and device patterns, traffic modifications, packet errors, shifts in locations, and usage trends. It knows what the network’s needs are (and when they are), and it self-adjusts to ensure the best quality of service. By watching time, usage, and trends, it also self-tickets when network enhancements or changes would increase the user experience and system performance – all with zero configurations.

On the security front, you can see how the simplicity and protected nature of the entire NaaS makes it designed with zero trust from the ground up. The simplified and unified access approach delivers functionalities like 802.1X, MAB, and SSO, for both wired and wireless networks with no network configurations, thereby drastically lowering the vulnerability risk due to configurations. Let’s not forget that 95% of cyber breaches occur as a direct result of human error.

Obviously, AI-based automation has a big role inside a self-contained NaaS, from analysis to self-management to trend detection. I wrote a blog about how the pendulum swings between centralized and decentralized servers some time ago. The NaaS transformation that I see with Nile will similarly shift the concept of highly complex, all open, and virtualized systems to embracing elegant and secure closed systems. Let’s see, but I’m sold!