In a recent interview, Ariana Lynn, Principal Analyst at The Fast Mode spoke to Nate Delanoy, Senior Director of Product & Business Development at Segra on the impact of traffic visibility on modern IP networks. Nate joins us in a series of discussions with leading networking, analytics and cybersecurity companies, assessing the need for traffic filtering technologies that can deliver real-time, granular application awareness. The series explores how advanced analytics power various network functions amidst the rapid growth in traffic and applications.
Ariana: How important is traffic visibility for your suite of solutions and products?
Nate: At SEGRA, ensuring traffic visibility is paramount to our comprehensive suite of solutions focused on business-class fiber for direct Internet access and private networks. In an increasingly tech-driven world, understanding the flow of data across our networks is not only crucial for optimizing performance and reliability but also for ensuring security and compliance, and meeting the ever-growing needs of our customers. Specifically, SEGRA’s SD-WAN solutions deliver elevated network traffic control and visibility in one easy-to-use space. Our service provides a holistic view, spanning across a customer’s entire network to branch location(s) – or even to individual laptops and workstations.
What’s more, SEGRA SD‐WAN provides consolidated monitoring and visibility across a variety of physical transports and service providers, as well as across all remote sites. This monitoring capability offers business‐level visibility, such as application usage and network resource utilization. SEGRA SD‐WAN adds detailed performance monitoring across all components of the data plane. Customers and SEGRA support teams leverage the visibility to accelerate troubleshooting and minimize downtime. The added visibility that SEGRA SD-WAN provides allows for the creation and adjustments of business policies to prioritize or add redundancy to critical applications and traffic types. Performance monitoring enables intelligent steering of application traffic across different paths and resources within the virtual WAN network. Overall, as we continue to drive innovation forward, traffic visibility is crucial to our business, offering a wide array of benefits and insights that allow us to deliver unparalleled connectivity to empower our customers’ success.
Ariana: How effective is deep packet inspection (DPI) technology in addressing today’s traffic complexities?
Nate: Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology plays a crucial role in managing and optimizing network traffic, especially in today’s complex digital landscape. DPI empowers telecom service providers like SEGRA, in addition to network administrators, to gain granular visibility into data packets traversing the network. By analyzing packet contents, DPI can identify specific applications, protocols and services. This information allows for efficient traffic shaping, ensuring that critical applications receive priority while managing bandwidth effectively.
DPI also improves network security, going beyond traditional packet filtering by examining the payload of each packet. It can detect hidden threats, such as malware, data exfiltration attempts and content policy violations. By identifying and blocking malicious traffic, DPI contributes significantly to network security.
DPI enables fine-grained control over network resources, allowing for optimization of Quality of Service (QoS). By understanding application-specific requirements, it ensures that mission-critical services receive the necessary bandwidth and low latency. This optimization enhances user experience and overall network performance.
Valuable insights into traffic patterns, application usage and service demands are enhanced and accessible using DPI. Network planners can use this information to make informed decisions about capacity upgrades, infrastructure enhancements and future network designs.
Today’s traffic complexities – from managing and optimizing the traffic to improving security to putting controls in place to network planning – all depend on and are made most effective using deep packet inspection.
Nate Delanoy is the Senior Director of Product & Business Development at Segra where he leads a team of product managers who provide innovative technologies and services to Segra’s business and enterprise customers, delivering connectivity, collaboration, cloud and cybersecurity solutions. For over 22 years, Nate has been with the Segra team in a variety of roles including IP Analyst, ATM Frame Relay Analyst, Enterprise Sales Engineer, Carrier Sales Engineer, Product Manager, and Director of Business Development. Nate holds or has previously held various technology/industry/vendor specific certifications from Velo Cloud/VM-Ware, Cisco, Cradlepoint, Ciena, Nokia, Commscope and Global Knowledge.
This interview is a part of The Fast Mode’s Traffic Visibility segment, featuring leading networking, analytics and cybersecurity companies and their views on the importance of network intelligence and DPI for today’s IP networks. A research report on this topic will be published in June 2024 – for more information, visit here.
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