Why AI Is Pushing Networks Toward Autonomy

Hey guys, thanks for the tour. We're here with Sashi Koran, who's the CMO for Nile, and we're talking about how autonomous networks are, are starting to emerge in the age of ai. Sashi, welcome to the show.

Well, thanks for having me, Mike. So just how are networks going to evolve? We've been talking about automation and networking for as long as I can remember, and, and we had software defined networks, and that was supposed to lead to this nirvana, but we never quite seemed to get there.

And now we're kind of looking at it in the age of ai. So explain, if you would, what's changing here? Well, Mike, um, we see a lot of that, um, around us as consumers.

You know, you have, um, autonomous vehicles now. We have a lot of, uh, things that are becoming, um, sort of functioning on their own. And, uh, when you apply it more into the business side of things, and particularly into networking, this has been a long sought after marijuana for many, you know.

So I think, uh, it's interesting to see the, the journey that's happened, uh, on the path to autonomy, uh, over the last, uh, couple of decades. But, um, you're right in terms of, um, really looking at it from an automation perspective. Um, and if you look at it in the context of the broader enterprise, uh, we've seen this journey with regards to a high degree of au autonomy and AU automation happening in the data center where a few operators can actually manage, uh, a fairly, um, complex environment.

And, uh, we've started to see the journey happen in the wide area networks as well, um, with, uh, SD wan, as you might be familiar with. And that sort of gave the promise of, um, automation and management for a number of, uh, devices. And, um, then it started to bleed into, um, you know, SSE and things like that.

And where we are at that journey is now into branch and campus environments. And if you start to look at, um, these environments, which is, um, you know, you could think of it as a bank branch, a university campus, a manufacturing entity, a healthcare institution. Unlike the data centers, you know, this is where, um, you have users, you have, uh, devices, you have things.

And so it's a far more complex environment to automate. And, um, it also leads to, um, challenges with security challenges with, um, really making that network a lot more agile. And, uh, applying the notion of autonomous networking here is really a very big deal.

And, uh, so that's sort of the journey we are on, which is to look at, um, incidents proactively look at patterns proactively, and make the network navigate to these ahead of anybody requiring to manually intervene. And so, um, the more we can take away from manual intervention and manual configuration, manual provisioning, and go down this path of a hands-off operations, then, uh, the network becomes more resilient, more secure, more agile. And so I think we're on the cusp of a lot of these things.

And at Nile, we are, uh, at the forefront of driving these autonomous networks today. Mm-hmm. And how does that manifest itself?

Let's say that I have an endpoint and I am trying to access some service on the backend. Does the network know that there's a down server somewhere and that it just automatically reroutes it? Or how smart is smart?

Yeah, so it's a combination of a lot of these things, uh, whether you look at it from a network performance issues, whether you look at it from network resiliency or network security. I mean, all of these are things that happen in a real world environment. And the more intelligent the network can be, the more it has these patterns recognized more, you take advantage of, uh, artificial intelligence and bake these into the foundation of the network itself, then the operations start to become a lot more autonomous without the need for manual intervention.

And, uh, for a lot of, uh, you know, C-level, um, stakeholders, their mandate today is to drive transformation. But the mandate also is to do that while reducing risk and cost. So it's sort of a balancing act and, uh, autonomous, uh, networking sort of helps bring that balance in a healthy way.

'cause uh, you know, you can move faster with agility, but you don't have compromises in terms of, you know, performance incidents, uh, reliability, resiliency incidents are more importantly security breaches. So a lot of these can be, um, uh, you know, navigated through this Norton notion of autonomous operations. And, uh, Mike, you've been covering the industry for a long time.

Uh, you know, for every dollar that they spend on CapEx, there are six or $7 they spend terms of operations over the life lifecycle of the network. And if you can really get, uh, to tame that beast of operational cost and complexity, it becomes much easier for them to move forward with their transformation initiatives. So that's really, uh, the crux of autonomous networks.

It isn't just to bring, um, everything under automation. It's how do you do so without making it brittle? How do you do so without, uh, increasing risk and complexity?

And how do you do so while reducing costs? So that's the, um, the leveler, you know, which we're, uh, achieving in, you know, customer environments day by day. There are, of course, a lot of types of AI these days.

So is this more of the predictive AI that's then being used to reroute the traffic? Or is it a combination of predictive, uh, generative and a little causal and all those things together kind of create this autonomous network? Yeah, it's, it's an evolution as with everything else.

And when you put things into real world production environments, um, it has to make sense, you know, so I think we look at the maturity of a lot of these technologies as they evolve. And, uh, at least with Nile's architecture, we're a bit different from, you know, box vendors that will put features in a box and then ship it, and somebody else is expected to own the service delivery. Uh, Nile actually, uh, owns that aspect of both the technology as well as the operations and the service delivery end to end.

So we have a greater purview of what's happening across the entire environment compared to any other vendor out there today. And so that gives us, in some ways an unfair advantage of being able to drive autonomy and to take these principles of, uh, AI and make sure that we're rolling these out with a great sense of responsibility. But, uh, architecture is also designed in such a way that it is not a, a la carte approach with, you know, different versions for different people when we, you know, roll something out, uh, if we recognize something with one deployment, all the deployment globally gets to take benefit from it because we have stopped standardized on the architecture.

So this in turn, you know, brings in a greater degree of resiliency. And, um, I think, um, month on month, year on, we are, we're becoming more mature, more autonomous as a result. Mm-hmm.

What becomes of the role of what we know as the network engineer these days? Uh, many of them have spent a lifetime using, you know, CLI tools to troubleshoot networks. But, um, how does their position kinda evolve into something maybe, I don't know, less stressful or more fun?

I don't know. Yeah, look, I think, um, I have, uh, been in this industry for close to three decades, and I know you've been covering this industry for quite some time. And, uh, we've always talked about, uh, making the lives of people that are configuring networks and infrastructure in general a lot more easier, you know, so, um, I think, uh, this journey that we are on, on the road to autonomous networking is really meant to augment their skillset, make them much more productive, focus on more strategic initiatives.

'cause let's face it, um, almost every organization, no matter how big or small it is, including Fortune 500 organizations, are really being challenged to do more with less. Nobody's getting this flood of IT resources to grow their teams. And so the existing teams in many cases are, um, suffering from burnouts.

And, uh, many cases, especially when you look at the branch and campus environments that I talked about, you don't have the IT staff in 90% of, um, you know, these environments, even for large companies. So they end up outsourcing it, and that outsourcing is non-standardized, and they have to manage this, uh, operations and try to bring that consistency of the operational model. So these are challenges that hasn't necessarily been solved in the industry with the status quo that we see.

And so if you can tame that beast, particularly on these edge environments where you don't have the IT staff or you don't have the skillset, or you've outsourced to multiple operators, if you're a global company with offices, you know, uh, worldwide, how do you kind of bring that and make sure that you have the degree of accountability for your organization? How do you bring consistency? So we think, uh, you know, it's something that, um, not just the network, but network and security engineers, these two things we view as two sides of the same coin are just going to welcome it.

And a lot of the response that we're seeing are from, um, network and security engineers because we're helping make their lives a bit more easier and, um, you know, the environment more reliable and safer for their organizations. Mm-hmm. Do you think we'll get to the point where the network is much more secure than it is generally today in the age of autonomous networks?

Because I'll be able to have, maybe there may be more transparency in real time to see what the nature of the attack is and respond, or is it just gonna be, you know, a fundamentally hardened network and it's just by definition more secure? Yeah, look, I think, um, security is again, a journey and, uh, it's always a battle in terms of how do you outsmart your opponent. Um, and it's a combination of, uh, a defensive strategy as well as something that's more offensive.

And, um, you have to, uh, get lucky each time as somebody who's defending the network versus an attacker was to sort of get lucky just once. Um, and so again, if you look at it, um, I, I look at holistically across the enterprise. Uh, we have solved a lot of these problems as an industry in the data center where you're moved away from perimeter security to looking at security for applications, looking at lateral security for workloads and things like that.

And then we talked about SAS in the, in the van, which has been a topic of conversation for six, seven years now. And, you know, different vendors and providers are moving towards that model. But if you look at the branch and campus environments, which is where the bulk of the users are, devices are, things are, it's still the, you know, wild west from the 1990s, and you cannot solve the security problem, thereby adding one more box or one more protocol, it needs a fundamental rethink.

And that's really what we've done where we have, you know, brought in these, uh, data center class security constructs into these distributed branch and office, uh, campus environments and, uh, espoused to zero trust as a foundation. And, uh, you know, some of the things that we did recently, which we actually put out some news releases were really, um, you know, getting into hacking environments with not a hardened model, but our standard offering that we, you know, give out of the box, so to say. Um, and, uh, we had a million plus hacking attacks and zero breaches.

We recently ran the entire network for Black Hat, which is a cybersecurity conference, 40,000 attendees, three plus days cap, world's largest capture the flag competition, zero incidents. So a lot of these are, uh, proof points of how we're able to build a zero trust fabric and layer in this networking and connectivity, um, on top of that foundation, which is radically different from every other approach that's out there in the industry today. And we think, um, you know, it gives a huge leg up to organizations that can take advantage of this architecture, advantage of this network as a service, you know, delivery.

And this autonomous operations, the three of them sort of combining together to form a solution is a very, very powerful offering. Mm-hmm. As you kinda look forward into this coming year, are we maybe approaching a point where the whole notion of, you know, downtime caused by a network outage might become obsolete?

It's conceivable, um, you know, downtime can be caused by, you know, obviously, obviously software issues, hardware issues, but many times, you know, if you start to analyze these patterns, you see downtimes, um, being caused by manual errors, even security issues, if you look at it, a lot of them are due to manual errors, which are inadvertent. You know, they're not malicious by nature, they're inadvertent, they're accidental. And so the more you can prevent some of these from occurring by going down this path by things that are built on zero trust foundation, things that don't require manual configuration, things that minimize manual intervention, we, we see, um, the resiliency as well as the security going up in order of magnitude to be higher, right?

So I frequently say that if you add more links into a chain, you're actually making the chain more weaker, not stronger, right? 'cause the chain is only as strong as the weakest link. And so if we can minimize these kind of links that you artificially introduced because your architecture or your box configuration requires that, then you're, you're, you're, um, opening more doors for security breaches and interventions.

And our approach has just been the opposite. And so I think, uh, as long as we can, you know, be intentional about when you need to manually intervene, um, and how do you, you know, bring in compliance? 'cause a lot of the complexity today in enforcing compliances, there are just too many variables and unknowns.

And so the more you can sort of bring those under your purview, then it becomes inherently much more secure. All right, folks, well, you heard it here. Autonomous networking is coming and it will certainly be automated alongside many other things that we're gonna use AI for.

The question now is how to get prepared for it. Hey, Sashi, thanks for being on the show. Thank You.

Having mine. All right. And back to you guys in the studio.