infoTECH Feature

September 09, 2014

At ITEXPO, SimpleWan's Eric Knight Talks Voice and Video Diagnosis and Security

At the recent ITEXPO (News - Alert) event held in August in Las Vegas, TMC’s Erik Linask caught up with Eric Knight, President of SimpleWan, a Phoenix-based provider of cloud-based routers. SimpleWan is a provider of vMPLS, or virtualized multiprotocol label switching that enables customers to bring together their offices and remote locations over any type of broadband connection or connections from any service provider or collection of carriers, and do it in an affordable, subscription-based manner. During the talk, Knight described the beginnings of SimpleWan.

“We used to be a hosted Web provider,” he said. “We did it about 10 years, and moved away from this year, and split it with the SimpleWan company, which has been in operation for about a year and a half. What SimpleWan is is a cloud-based router designed for the people we were competing against -- the hosted Web providers – and the PoS provider, security/IT people who want to centrally manage a firewall system that’s constantly automatically patched. If you were to make a rule set or do a security thing that puts them out of PCI (News - Alert) compliance or HIPAA compliance, it’s going to alert them. It’s basically the modern day equivalent of your security monitoring service for your home or office alarm system.”

Knight noted that there was a “massive need” in the market for this type of solution. Even the large networking solutions providers aren’t offering comparable technology.

“They’re not providing the tools to diagnose complicated things like voice and video,” he said. “Voice and video are very complicated to support. We did VoIP for a very long time, and it’s not like your normal network services, when a Web server’s down, or something like that. It’s very complicated. They take different paths. So when you’re talking on the phone, when you’re talking it’s going one way through the Internet, and when you’re hearing back, it’s going another way. And most of the time, the users don’t see that; nor do they care.”

But when users call because they are not getting voice or video, Knight says it often would take a day or two to diagnose. With the toolkit SimpleWan has developed over the years, Knight says it can be done in about 10 minutes.

Knight and Linask also discussed security issues, which are on everyone’s mind today.

“We provide real time and active security,” said Knight. “Most people deploy a device, and it may get the occasional firmware update. It may get the occasional once-over from the IT guy. It’s sitting there and it’s idle, and all these threats are constantly hitting it. Nobody’s monitoring that. Part of our service actively checks that: if someone’s trying to break into your device, it’s going to notify you. If you’re having connectivity problems, it’s also going to notify you,” he said, noting that in most cases, security breaches are only detected by third parties months after they occur.

Knight says that the IT industry needs more awareness when it comes to understanding security breaches and other problems.

“We do a lot of interviews, we do a lot of consulting…making people aware of it,” he said. “A lot of businesses now are really turning a blind eye to it, but as regulation cracks down, that’s going to stop.”




Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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