Nile co-founder and CEO Pankaj Patel   Source: Nile

Two former Cisco executives co-founded networking company Nile, aiming to redesign the network and remove human dependence by offering “new age” network-as-a-service (NaaS) and adopting “out-of-box” automatic zero-trust security. The vendor claims the model is similar to what the cloud did to computing and storage. 

Nile co-founder and CEO Pankaj Patel retired from Cisco as its EVP and chief development officer in 2016. John Chambers led the networking giant for two decades as CEO and executive chairman. The leadership duo announced their networking startup this week. 

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me personally … to really shift the paradigm of a networking industry, not just for the sake of disruption, but for removing insane complexity out of networking,” Patel told SDxCentral. “Our audacious vision has been to remove incredible human dependence from managing the network that exists today.”

This principle also applies to how Nile approaches network security. The company claims it takes a holistic security approach and designs a zero-trust network that requires no network operations. 

Patel said Nile takes a broad look across network, cloud, and data security areas, such as adopting zero-trust strategies, applying end-to-end traffic encryption; providing identity and access management; and keeping the data in the cloud, complying with data privacy policies following Apple and Google’s models.  

Nile bakes in zero-trust principles by authenticating and authorizing every person and device while providing continuous verifications, Patel claims.

“What we do is we force that traffic to go up to the firewall and then come back so that now we are in a process of authenticating and authorizing the flow going up and then we let the firewall do its job before it comes back down,” he said.

Nile also isolates the traffic to prevent lateral movement. “We have created the micro-segmentation going down to a user and device level … because we wanted to make sure that there is no way somebody can propagate the malware or DDoS attack horizontally inside the enterprise,” Patel said.

The vendor removes humans from the security configuration to remove errors and also puts trusted platform module (TPM) and media access control security (MACsec) devices into the hardware for verification and network traffic encryption. “This is the blackbox design gives us the power where we take out the men in the middle that they cannot impact anything, they can change anything," Patel explained.

Nile also takes care of the design, hardware, software, installation, maintenance, and ongoing management for users with a consumption-based model that charges customers based on the number of users each month. 

“I really chose to do the clean sheet approach and essentially at a high level we are trying to do to the networking world [similar to what] cloud did to compute and storage,” Patel said, adding that “we want to deliver this as a pay-as-you-use consumption model that aligns to the number of users on the network.”

Other vendors like Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Dell Technologies are pushing for this network-as-a-service (NaaS) model that typically includes on-demand usage, a consumption-based billing model, self-service capabilities, and elements such as network routers, switches, gateways, and firewalls.

"We differentiate from anybody,” Patel argues. But “incumbents offer this as in some fancy financing the lease mechanism for the platform that the boxes that they sell. That's not what this is.” 

He calls Nile’s service “the very first new-age enterprise network-as-a-service. It is really based on what number of users that enterprises have on a given day, every single day, and be true up to the number of users."