In a recent interview, Ariana Lynn, Principal Analyst at The Fast Mode spoke to Mark Daley, Director of Digital Strategy and Business Development at Epsilon on the impact of traffic visibility on modern IP networks. Mark 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 do your solutions and products fulfil the demands of today's networks?
Mark: As the cloud landscape, mobile technology and other digital enablers rapidly expand, many businesses are being driven to adopt digital transformation strategies for cost-efficiency and profitability gains as well as to increase the customer experience. This in turn is driving the need for networking solutions that enable and support these strategies.
Our proprietary Network-as-a-Service Platform, Infiny, is designed specifically to address these needs by simplifying and accelerating the buying, deploying, monitoring and scaling of network services for our customers, including carriers, service providers and enterprises. It is a platform underpinned by a robust, hyper-scalable global backbone spanning over 300 Points of Presence and a growing ecosystem of Internet Exchanges (IXs), Cloud and network partners.
As one of the leading global interconnectivity providers, we offer a comprehensive range of connectivity and communications solutions including cloud connectivity, remote peering, dedicated internet access, SD WAN, data centre interconnect, co-location, voice services, and more. Through our Infiny platform, businesses have real-time, online access and control of these connectivity and communications solutions, leveraging our high-performance global network as if it were their own. By providing access to an extensive ecosystem of Points of Presence (PoPs) and partners via this dynamic platform, we empower businesses to set up and manage connections with less hassle and greater flexibility, achieving complete digital agility.
Given the rise in multi-cloud services and applications, our inter-cloud routing and networking solutions enable businesses to automate the provisioning of cloud services and seamlessly connect and manage their applications and data across multiple cloud environments. This also helps businesses reduce their cloud egress costs, and safeguard cloud access for businesses using multiple cloud providers.
To keep up with today’s complex networking landscape, Epsilon offers additional managed services overlayed on our connectivity infrastructure. One such example is our managed SD WAN. It is a flexible networking solution for enterprises to securely interconnect their branch sites, data centres, and major sites. Integrated with Secure Service Edge (SSE), our solution offers a cloud-based Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture, ensuring security for all data and users, whether working remotely or from an office.
Ariana: How effective is deep packet inspection (DPI) technology in addressing today's traffic complexities?
Mark: Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology is highly effective in addressing today's traffic complexities and plays a crucial role in ensuring the integrity and security of modern networks.
SD WAN solutions leverage DPI to automatically detect applications and route data accordingly. Additionally, DPI enables the direct routing of trusted SaaS data to the SaaS provider, ensuring secure internet access for untrusted connections.
Next-generation firewalls, a network security device that provides capabilities beyond a traditional, stateful firewall, utilise DPI to inspect data, enabling the detection and blocking of users connecting to malicious websites. DPI is also used to ensure robust virus protection and facilitates Unified Threat Protection.
Another security solution, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection systems also employ DPI to detect attacks based on all known threat signatures, significantly enhancing network security and reliability.
Mark Daley is Director of Digital Strategy and Business Development at Epsilon Telecommunications. Mark leads Epsilon’s portfolio of Data and Colocation services whilst playing a leading role in identifying and developing Epsilon’s cutting-edge cloud and eco-system strategies, with a focus on market and customer needs and technologies such as SDN and service automation. A veteran telecommunications professional, Mark served 14 years with Telstra and other high profile telecommunication companies such as NTT and eircom. Mark held leading Products and Marketing roles in Telstra’s move into the European market in the mid-1990s and wrote NTT’s European ICT strategy in the mid-2000s which they continue to deliver today. He was also responsible for winning NTT’s first-ever World Communications Award.
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.
