Introduction to Nile NaaS for Strengthening Enterprise Security

My name is Shahi Kiran, and, um, I recently joined Nile a little over a month ago to lead up some of our marketing efforts. I, um, came over from, uh, checkpoint software where I served as a CMO till about, uh, July-ish. And today we're gonna be talking about, uh, how we reimagine, um, security in the local area networks, um, using AI powered nasa.

And nasa, as many of you know, is network as a service, right? So, um, I'm gonna kick things off, introduce you to the company, what we do, why we are here, and then, um, we'll talk about, um, what's the architectural shift, Niles, bringing, bringing about that, uh, is leading us to this conversation, how it helps reinforce security. It's gonna be covered by Reh, the chief product officer and one of the co-founders of the company.

Then, uh, we're going to start to bring some of what we talk about so it doesn't just slide where we're gonna take a use case led approach. Um, so Shiv, who heads up our product management, uh, will come over and unveil a few use cases from a security perspective. And, uh, we'll also share some demos.

But, uh, what we also wanted to do was to bring in a customer of ours who can share with you why they went with Nile, what was they were looking for, and, uh, this is going to be Drew from Jet Zero, right? So let's keep the session interactive and um, we'll get the ball rolling. So with that, um, I just wanted to, uh, share with you a bit about Nile.

For many of you that are new to the company, um, this was, uh, founded a few years ago with the simple mission of saying, we want to be the easy button for network and security for on-premises deployment with a solution that just works, right? And in some ways, the, the concept is embodied in the name of the company itself, Nile. 'cause when you think of Nile, um, it's really about water.

And, um, all of us know that, you know, networks are fairly complicated over the ages, and how do you make something relatively simple to consume? And, uh, so it's a concept where you want networks to just flow, which is what the, um, the na terminology embodies. And, um, today you also, you know, call a few people.

And, uh, you ask, um, you know, a hundred men maroon on an island, do you want, um, your wife to be with you, or do you want wifi? And, uh, 99 of the hundred will say, you know, I want wifi. And for my wife who's watching, I was the only guy who said wife, you know?

Um, so again, you ask women, you know, you want your husband or broadband, and you'd say, Hey, I want broadband. So kidding aside the point being, you know, connectivity is the lifeblood of most organizations. And today, you cannot disassociate connectivity from security.

The two go hand in hand. But unfortunately that's not the case in terms of how things were built. Um, and so that's the problem we're trying to solve, and that's the mission statement.

And the people that built this company were essentially people who built the gear that runs the internet that most of us are on today. Uh, so some of the names you might recognize as co-founders and backers of the company are John Chambers, who's the former CEO and chairman of Cisco. Um, his, uh, chief development officer is the CEO of Nile, and he ran an organization about 30,000 people.

So there are a lot of people who knew how to build, um, systems at scale that really power what most of us are using today. And that's the same philosophy that has been brought into Nile. And if you just look at it from a numbers perspective, we're operating in about 30 countries.

And, um, um, a number of verticals, uh, you'll see where, where we start to, you know, span into, um, the company's been highly innovative, churning out a lot of patents, which are driving this architectural shift that we're making today. We just debuted as a visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for unified wired and wireless. And hopefully we'll be in a few others in the foreseeable future, some scale of deployments.

We have, uh, our solution powering and running, um, a warehouse, which is over 12 million square feet. And, uh, you see, uh, you know, users, we were able to handle over 200,000, um, users, um, on a concurrent setting. Uh, so these are some stats that you will see with regards to Nile and how we're building the company and scaling things up.

Now, what does this mean in regards to security, right? And that's really the reason why all of us are here. I think the way to start about looking at security is not in isolation, but, uh, holistically across the enterprise.

And we all know that for applications to run, you need underlying infrastructure that needs to be inherently secure. And if we dial the clock back the last 15, 20 years, there's been a tremendous amount of focus that's gone on into data centers, right? So you've seen data center infrastructure that was, uh, clunky, now become much more of a converged pool with compute, you know, server, um, compute, server storage, uh, systems, applications sort of coming together.

There's a tremendous amount of investment that has gone into the data center. And by definition, the cloud, because the cloud, every cloud is somebody's data center. And if you look at it, you know, the convergence that's been there has been a result of the unification.

There's a lot of emphasis on simplifying things, as we all know. You know, um, complexity is the number one attack vector. And everybody's looking at simplification.

You hear talks about platformization and things like that, but a huge emphasis on automation as well. And so that's, uh, brought in a degree of predictability And security to certain extent in the data center and cloud environments. And over the last decade or so, we've seen that, uh, extend into the wide area as well.

And you're all familiar with, uh, you know, the notions of SD-WAN zero trust extending there, and then, uh, SSE, which is essentially a convergence of network network security. But when you now start to look beyond the van and into local area environments, we see that, um, there isn't a standardized solution. You know, there's a huge amount of standardization that happened in the data center and cloud.

We started to see that in the context of, um, the van. But when you look at, uh, the lan, um, it's, uh, a big question mark. And, um, unfortunately or fortunately, this is where all of us are, right?

We are the users. Um, so we come in there, we bring our devices, and, uh, we have, uh, you know, surveillance cameras, printers, um, refrigerators, whatnot, all of these things that we term as I, iot, ot, that's there. And these, by definition, aren't necessarily secure today.

And so when you look at the surface area of attack across the entire enterprise, the place where you have the most users, the most devices has the least investment and is the least secure. And so, uh, from an enterprise perspective, this is an area that really beg begs the same degree of unification, simplification, automation that we started off in the data center and cloud started taking into the van to bring about. And so that's the area that Nile is starting to tackle.

Um, so today, um, when we look at, uh, this landscape, the question is, you know, how do you make the land, uh, first class citizen of the enterprise from a security standpoint? And much the way, same way as we've had it in, um, the data center and, and the van. And, um, when you look at the land, what are we talking about?

We're talking about corporate headquarters, we're talking about warehouses, hospitals, banks, universities, name it. Any, any place where, you know, users come like in this room or in a bigger setting, um, how do we kind of secure that? And in other words, how do we bring this data center class security into local area environments and make the land a first class citizen of enterprise security?

So that's the mission that we're on, and it's a huge problem to tackle. It's an ambitious undertaking. And, uh, there's a lot of corporate spaghetti in terms of how these environments are deployed, and we wanna bring in a degree of standardization and start to make them inherently more secure.

So why now, you know, this has been a longstanding issue to a certain extent. Um, so why now on one hand, you know, you see the progression of things that are happening, um, in the, uh, in the data center and van. And when you start to look at, you know, local area on premises environments, we're having the return to office mandates.

You know, people are coming back into office environments, into universities, and, um, there's a mandate coming in in many cases to come in five days a week. But there's also hybrid work that is prevalent. So when people come in, obviously they need to have that connected experience, which is inherently secure.

The second thing we're seeing is because of the pandemic, a lot of companies ended up pushing out refresh of their gears. Um, typically these are refreshed five to seven years. And they said, okay, we don't have anybody in the office, so let me just focus on remote user, the data center.

Let me strengthen, invest there. So this has been deferred to a lot of reasons. And the longer you defer the refresh, you know, it starts to create, uh, issues with security vulnerabilities.

And, um, OT has been, um, a issue that not a lot of people have been addressed. It's been an overlay solution that isn't inherently secure. And today, one third of the security breaches are happening in these environments.

More than a third are happening because the lack of OT devices being embedded with security. And to top it all off, you have, you're having a number of, uh, you know, uh, institutions really challenging their IT organization to do more with less. We weren't seeing the expansion of the IT workforce.

We're seeing much more constraints. Budgets are getting constrained. Everybody's being asked to look at taking advantage of ai, which also happens to be a security threat as well.

So budget resource constraints. So I look at it as the perfect storm of the three Ws. You know, you're having the workplace challenge, we're having the workspace challenge and the workforce challenge.

And so that's the perfect storm where, you know, people are saying, okay, how do I go get ahead of this? 'cause you don't want a huge surface area of your enterprise to be exposed. And how do you do it in an easy way?

Because if you look at the LAN status quo today, what, what is it that we see? On one hand these have been built up over a number of years. And, um, you see this security solution being a solution of one box on top of another box, one solution, on top of another solution.

So it's, it's kind of stacked up. And every time a new security concept comes in, it's an add-on to this box, uh, which is essentially a lot of points. Solution representing complexity.

And when you stack these up, they're also not simple to manage. Each one is a different management plan. Each one has a different management console.

Each one has a different update cycle, different patch requirement, different licensing. So inherently there are a lot of, uh, operational complexity that's built in. And then as we talked about, budget and resources aren't, um, you know, coming in flood either.

Some try to go down the path of a pure play MSP, but the MSP doesn't own the technology. They're there to manage it. And so then you get into this wall of frustration with trouble ticketing.

So net net, um, you know, most organizations that want to embrace the concepts of zero trust like you have in data center and van are essentially challenged to do so. And in many cases, as partners and others are predicting, they're gonna walk away because, uh, the nana to get to zero trust is sometimes more complicated in this spaghetti mess that we have. Um, so that's, that's a challenge, right?

So how do you kind of solve this? And our PCs was, you cannot solve this equation by bringing one more box and stacking it on top of it. It's, it's not a pure play appliance driven solution.

It's not another overlay software that you bring in. 'cause if this needs to be solved, you need to take a first principles approach, which is, uh, rethink of the current architecture. And so when you start to say, okay, how do I rethink, how do I solve this problem?

And, uh, start to make it go away, the, we have to reimagine this architecture from the foundation up. So take all of these point solutions and much as we did in the way data center and in the wan, can we start to unify that? Could we unify that stack and bring in a lot of things that would be disparate appliances and software elements and bake that into a foundational fabric itself?

So that's the step number one that we've taken, which is to build a zero trust fabric that embodies embeds a number of things that would otherwise be sort of disparate. And things like, you know, wired and wireless, even with companies that are claiming unity, they have different, uh, policy engines, different management constructs. We've unified that.

We've unified network and security. We have unified it. OT brought that natively into the fabric.

So that's a foundational element. The second thing is how do you start to simplify the operations? You know, a number of, uh, you in the security space know that, uh, 70% of any of these vulnerabilities are people configuring with all good intent.

And, uh, you, there's a trend now to move away from these hands-on operations to hands off, bring in autonomous, uh, operations powered by ai. So we want to simplify these operations and take ownership of the lifecycle. So this isn't a box play where we are saying somebody else go run the operation.

We are saying we will have to take accountability for the operations for it to be inherently secure and with AI ops done in an autonomous way. And the third really is about taking ownership of the service delivery, making it easy like water to manage change. It has to be utilitarian.

Change management should be easier. Making things come up should be easy. And, uh, business, uh, business, um, uh, ads, moves and changes should be relatively easy.

So we brought in constructs of an AI power service cloud, much the way you think of SaaS. Can we bring that to nas? So those are the thesis that, uh, Nile is looking at.

And it isn't looking at these as three different silos. The power is really in how you bring them together into a seamless entity where the zero trust fabric, which lays the foundation, is converged with the ability to deliver it, uh, as a service. And all of this is to simplified operations that are powered by ai.

And so you can, you know, think about it as this, uh, power of zero. So you have zero trust, zero touch, uh, with zero configuration, zero provisioning required in a way. And also, you know, getting down the path of zero CapEx because a number of companies are really challenged to scro budget every five to seven years and go make this huge investment, which is why they're differing investments.

So can we bring this into completely, uh, an OPEX model with predictable cost structure? So that's the Nile, and we really, really want to be the easy button for network and security in the local area environment. So, uh, with that, I want to just expose you to how we think of this architecturally, and we'll go do a deeper dive and, um, introduce you to some of the components.

So what I talked about is the zero trust fabric is essentially the foundational layer around which a lot of these things are built. So we have our aps, our switches, our sensors, gateways coming about, and these are, you know, service edge portfolio on the land. Much as you look at SSE and services Edge on the, uh, from a wide area perspective, we have an AI powered services cloud, which is where a lot of the intelligence resides.

And, uh, we have a services catalog, which is continuing to expand. And much as you can think of a software service catalog, think of a network and security services catalog, which you can, um, download, uh, or sort of invokes not a download concept, but it's a invocation concept where you add new services. So this is really what we're enabling for our customers.

And, uh, the two things by the side that you see are very important. On one hand, as I mentioned, we take accountability for the operations, and that means we have our own AI ops command center, which looks at the entire entity and takes ownership of a service, SLAA performance, SLA end to end with the, uh, backing of, uh, AI getting into a lot more predictive capability, closed loop automation, ability to have, you know, monitoring 25, 24 by seven, things like that. And we're the ones who own the technology with all of the hardware and software, but we also deliver it as a service.

And that's a very unique concept in the industry today. And then obviously customers, they can also have visibility control. We have third party integration we'll talk about, and this is what's gets rolled out to different institutions as we talked about, uh, addressing the needs of securing users, it iot and devices in a holistic way, right?

So that's sort of the architecture of the company. And, um, I just want to share some of the reasons why some customers have gone with us. You know, guest service, we'll talk about this.

It's, uh, it's a clergy thing in most environments. We made it, uh, completely isolated, very easy to implement companies that were in compliance, regulatory requirements. Uh, they're choosing us for making that an easy button for, uh, bringing guests in.

Likewise, you know, the isolation and the degree of zero trust here, seeing people choose us, um, because everybody was continuing to pitch the legacy architecture, which might be good for a one time deployment, but then it compounds the complexity of the architecture. So, uh, some, some of them are choosing us for that. And so you see this pattern coming in, and we'll start to talk about what we've done with microsegmentation, what we've done with, uh, baking this into the fabric, all of which are starting to represent that architectural shift.