What’s Next is a biweekly conversation between SDxCentral CEO Matt Palmer and a senior-level executive from the technology industry.

Each video is an informal but in-depth video chat with a thought leader to uncover what the future holds for the enterprise IT and telecom markets — the hook is Palmer and the guest are long-term acquaintances, so expect a lively conversation.

This week's chat features Amir Khan, CEO, President, and Founder of Alkira. Khan previously founded and led Viptela’s SD-WAN business before its acquisition by Cisco.

Editor’s note: The following is a summary of the discussion that has been edited for length. To hear the rest, be sure to watch the video.

Matt Palmer: One of the questions that we're being asked quite frequently at SDxCentral really goes around two big pivots: One is, what should I be doing with my legacy network and where should I be going, where is networking going, and what should I be doing on overall enterprise networking? So with that, do you mind maybe sharing some of your thoughts with our audience?

Amir Khan: As we know, 15, 20 years ago as AWS (Amazon Web Services) and some of other cloud companies, they started helping us build our infrastructure into the cloud. I think the traffic patterns changed, the application locations changed the boundaries that we used to know as data centers or branches. Remote users were moving out because of COVID and other reasons. And even pre that, right? The applications and users, they were kind of getting spread way beyond the boundaries of the enterprise networks.

You saw some of that work when we started working on the web tele-solution as an example to provide some flexibility there. But that was restricted to the WAN by bringing internet and private connectivity together in a secure manner, and then seamlessly tying it to the rest of the enterprise networks.

But we started looking at the clouds. They were not carrier class or enterprise class. They were built for compute and storage to be very flexible and readily available. But when you started deploying a network as an enterprise, even in a single cloud environment, it was very tedious and cumbersome and all the features that you were used to, like end-to-end segmentation or routing controls or policy or compliance mechanisms, they were just not readily available.