Which metaphor best describes your network infrastructure? An original equipment manufactured engine purring along like it’s run less than 10,000 miles? Or a patchwork of after- market parts running a little rough and you’re wondering what each new rattle or ping really means? If you were honest, it would be the latter – and you’re not alone.
128 Technology is rethinking routing. If networking functionality can be software-based, that means the whole model of routing can be re-evaluated. It means we can introduce state into a router, which means we can take everything around the router in the old model and make it native to the router itself.
128 Technology also believes that routers can finally be much smarter about the packets they are forwarding. They can provide visibility into (and control over) key information describing a unique, bi-directional exchange between source and destination endpoints — what we call sessions — and apply security, performance, and control functions to the entire session.
Routers can now create rules for users and services and easily apply those rules in the router, enabling a far tighter alignment between the network and applications it supports.
It’s an exciting development, and it’s one that we’re proud to support here at Datavision. You may have heard our news that we’ve partnered with 128 Technology to offer the software-based 128T Networking Platform (128T) for the deployment of SD-WAN and other next-gen solutions. Read on for more about 128 Technology’s groundbreaking technology and how it can help your business.
Built-in Zero Trust Security
While a move to HTTPS may have resulted in increased security (and for some, improved Google page rankings), many enterprises saw negative network performance effects, due to how Next Generation Firewalls (NGFW) treat HTTPS traffic, and the prevalence of NGFWs across the internet.
Because of the way NGFWs treat HTTPS traffic, it is very difficult to create networks with built-
in Zero Trust Security (ZTS) using a NGFW – because the Zero Trust Network model requires the network to be segmented and have a routing/firewall device at the boundary of every segment. Imagine the expense and operational burden of doing that!
Since the NGFW functionality usually requires an expensive custom-build hardware, their use as the sole network security device is typically limited to the edge. Still, because end-to-end
encryption is enabled by default with HTTPS, the value of NGFW and other middleboxes which rely on cleartext layer 5-7 is going to come with latency caveats.
So, how is 128 Technology fixing it?
128 Technology is fixing networking through its core foundational principles:
- Secure Vector Routing (SVR): Not another device nor conventional software-defined SVR is a session-oriented approach for building context-aware networks that can easily, dynamically and securely stretch across network boundaries.
- Service Orientation: This service-centric approach is far more intuitive from a provisioning and administration perspective. Instead of mapping services through many networking layers to determine how to provision the network, our data model is based directly on services, tenants, and
- Zero Trust Security and Session Orientation: Because every 128 Technology router has knowledge of every tenant, along with the service topology, access control and policy can be easily baked into every possible route on the network on a session-by-session basis.
As a result, you can segment the network on an incredibly granular level, end-to-end across the entire network. So, while traditional traffic isolation and segmentation requires complex physical network separation techniques and/or overlays, the 128T Networking Platform can provide greater isolation in a more dynamic (and more simple) manner.
How’s that for Zero Trust?
By focusing on services across all network functions, the 128T Platform provides consistent management of services, tenants, and policies, ensuring dependable security.
The simplicity of this data model and reduction in network complexity provide management agility to quickly deploy and integrate new, revenue-generating services. With fewer functions to manage and session analytics to quickly isolate problems, the 128T Platform reduces operational expenditures for enterprises.
By rethinking routing, 128 Technology uniquely delivers service-oriented management, transforming network operations.
To read more about Datavision’s partnership with 128 Technology, click here.
