The University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) picked Nile's network-as-a-service (NaaS) offering to modernize its IT infrastructure for a few different reasons, UMKC CIO Andy Goodenow told SDxCentral.

There's an entire ecosystem of NaaS vendors selling cloud-like benefits to enterprise campus networks. But UMKC thought Nile was "the only company who could fulfill our specific requirements," even though the vendor is one of the newest on the market. "While there may be larger companies delivering NaaS, we felt Nile’s offer represented the most thorough and developed experience," Goodenow explained.

Compared to the network the university used to operate, Nile scores high on performance, reliability, and cost. "This upgrade in performance was immediately felt by students and faculty," Goodenow said. "Our IT staff has noticed a significant reduction in connectivity tickets thanks to the continuous monitoring and self-tuning the Nile network automatically does."

Nile's pricing model, which is fairly standard for this type of NaaS offering, was also attractive to UMKC because it lets the university scale up or down based on the amount of capacity it actually uses.

But the vendor's approach to security was the cherry on top. When searching for a NaaS offer, Nile was "the only provider who fully backed their service with guaranteed SLAs [service level agreements]," the CIO said.

Nile's security approach reduced the university's risk of cyberattacks and improved student security by implementing a "unified method of authentication" for wired and wireless campus networks. The vendor also follows zero-trust principles of isolation to reassure campus security teams that "malware could not proliferate throughout the school," Goodenow said.

Nile VP of Solutions Architecture Austin Hawthorne told SDxCentral the vendor's NaaS service was built to eliminate burdens and simplify the customer's network experience by removing the need for the university to buy, own, or maintain any physical infrastructure.

"One major step taken was the complete elimination of configurations," Hawthorne said. Human error leads to 95% of security breaches, so Nile removed the entire concept of configuration from its service. The network "can be set up through the simple process of scanning a QR code on an access point or switch, which will trigger the initialization," he explained. This accelerates network deployment time and reduces the potential for "risky misconfigurations."

The vendor says network access is only granted once a user is full authenticated and authorized. It uses built-in access controls to drive continuous authorization focused on user and device identity.

To that point, Nile implemented zero-trust "controls to ensure communication between users and devices was fully protected," Hawthorne added. "Our service enforces segmentation based on the network security policies established to ensure malware can’t proliferate laterally across devices." In addition, the network's monitoring features monitor for rogue APIs or switches being added.

"Our reputation is dependent on an assurance that the Nile network is secure," Hawthorne said. "Nobody can just walk into a building and connect to the network. Nobody is snooping the network by providing unified wired and wireless controls based on 802.1X."