 Hey everybody! This is JSA-TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals, and JSA Radio, your voice for tech and telecom on iHot Radio. I'm Jamie Scott of Pattaya, CEO of JSA, and on behalf of my team here at JSA, welcome to our monthly virtual roundtable. These virtual CEO roundtables lead us up to our on-site CEO roundtables. At our executive networking event, the telecom exchange, or TEX, next one up is TEX LA November 6th to 7th, Beverly Hills, where we talk network infrastructure readiness for IoT, AI, smart cities, blockchain, and more. So, if any of those keywords sound great to you and very interesting, and if you like the roundtable that you're going to hear just a few minutes, come on out and see our CEO roundtables live, more info at thetelecomexchange.com. One more quick housekeeping note before we get started. This is interactive. We want to hear from you, so if any of our live viewers who have joined us today have a question for any one of our speakers, please go ahead and type it in into that question box provided, and time permitting, we'll share it with our speakers. And for those who are joining on demand, welcome, welcome. If you have any questions, go ahead and email us at pr at jsa.net. We'll make sure your speaker gets that question. So, let's get started. Our topic today is AI and IoT, network automation, and service design for complex networks. It's my pleasure to introduce you to our executive lineup from three absolutely innovative companies. We have Mr. Jake King, he's the CEO of CMD or Command. Mr. Myande Walker, he's the CEO of Open Crypto Trust or Open CT. Boaz Rathalli, he's the VP of Operations and Engineering of the Sphere. So, gentlemen, welcome. Very excited to get right into it here. Let's go around the horn with the very first question. And we'll start with Jake. So, Jake, if you could tell us a little bit about your company and how you may be currently supporting AI and or IoT. Sure. So, CMD actually allows organizations to really intuitively monitor and control user interaction with Linux. We do this in several infrastructure environments, primarily for enterprises. And, essentially, our platform provides very comprehensive visibility into what's really going on in systems. We actually leverage AI in a number of capacities, both through anomaly detection from a user perspective, but also identifying abnormalities and behavior from user interactions or network connections. We do this to really bolster the signature-based threat intelligence and the signature-based rules that have been used for a number of years. And we've been doing it for a number of years. That's it. That's awesome. And to do it for a number of years in such a hot new emerging technology, it says a lot about your company. So, congratulations. Mayende, a little bit more on Open CT? Sure. So, my name is Mayende Walker. I'm the CEO of Open Crypto Trust. And we are leveraging Blockchain to securitize and to find greater efficiencies and cost savings in the world of telecommunications. So many folks associate distributed ledger technologies with the finance industry. We've chosen a very different path. And we're very excited about supporting telecommunications using Blockchain. In terms of AI, we have a number of strategic partners that we work with. As you can imagine, we're talking about large amounts of data that need to be transported to different locations, different networks. And we're very excited to be working with these partners to help them do that in an efficient way. Well said. Thanks, Mayende. Boaz, the Sphere. Hi. Thank you for being here. My name is Boaz Alfelli. I'm the VP of Operation and Engineering for the Sphere. My background is a little bit from the early days of the voiceover IP, creating and managing service providers networks. A little bit about the Sphere, which is a brand new innovative company that brings in as a global telecommunication ecosystem with an exchange platform at its core. So it's facilitating an unlimited multi-party chain trades, routing financial settlements in real time. And Streamline's business processes are just as network infrastructures and basically creates an environment for this huge telco environment to be able to be more efficient, removing all the challenges in both financial and technical, and bringing it to today's and tomorrow's future. AI is used in many of our platforming places that are like preventing fraudulent information and routes between our vendors and providing the edge case for each one of the different types of services we provide and the ability to learn and to basically change behavior according to the network behavior. Free innovative companies, I said it at the beginning, I stick to it. So let's get into some questions I've got. We'll start with Mayende and OpenCT. How can we last prepare ourselves, Mayende, for this onslaught of data hitting our network infrastructure? So I mean, I'm of the belief that in order to support this, we really need to embrace the power of decentralization. In order to achieve the necessary scalability and to ensure that we have a network that does not have a single point of failure and that is even platform independent, we need to seek decentralized storage, decentralized compute, and even decentralized transport. Open CryptoTrust focuses on the control and signaling of transport, which has great impact both from a security standpoint as well as just efficiency in terms of how telecommunications are done in the future. An excellent answer. And Boaz, how do you guys best prepare for that onslaught of data? So basically we were looking at this new era of data, which required us to look differently and prepare in a different way both the design of our infrastructure. So we've implemented all the latest capabilities offered in the market, utilizing the best of reads in global networks, such as auto scaling, self healing, global resilience, and with multiple cloud providers. Of course, we're incorporated the security levels in many different layers, utilizing enterprise WAF solutions for and exposed areas, a botnet protection be those on the application and networking. And looking at our SIP side, we also created several layers, allowing only the joint users within the ecosystem to actually use it. And every type of traffic that basically they send between point A and point B is monitored, and in real time we can decide if it's fraudulent or not. And if it's creating any kind of harmful using, of course, leveraging the blockchain and the actual abilities of the existing clouds today. So in our area, many of those things didn't exist in the telco world. And now we're basically taking the best out of each and every cloud in the market and providing it as a feature for the customers. And that's an actual nice tee up for Jake. Jake is onslaught of data, security, security, security. How's command dealing with it? So it's interesting. You know, I wanted to touch on a few of the points that Baez and Mande made as well. I think where it's really interesting is we're not having to reinvent the wheel when we when we look at building a business any longer. You know, we can take strong advantage of cloud service providers. Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Azure to really have a strong robustness in our designs and network. I think one of the ways that we prepare ourselves for these kind of data onslaughts from a security or from a robustness perspective is to take a strong advantage of the feature sets that are available to us today. You know, it was 10 years ago when we were having trouble managing infrastructure ourselves, and now it's infrastructure as a service. Anyone can start a system on their own and deal with terabytes of traffic if they need to in a month. I think one of the interesting things that we all need to take it on is these cloud service providers and different service offerings, especially with vendors and modern vendors, are offering really innovative solutions to how we scale our environments and how we scale our networks. But I like that you touched on the security part. Security is obviously an area of my focus. And security is a service in cloud is something that's, it's solely lacking in a few vendors that provide that infrastructure as a service. So, you know, I definitely think having a mature security posture or mature security program as you're developing and building your business is going to be building it in from the start and not implementing it after the fact where it gets very difficult to maintain. It's also around, you know, understanding the scalable requirements of your business. Each different solution out there is going to have very specific requirements around, you know, the data ingestion volumes as Miande was talking about, but also, as Bo has mentioned, you know, different constraints of times a day or days a week. It's important to take consideration into planning and correctly assessing the needs of your business and building that out to such. In Miande, sorry to go off track here, but I feel like your blockchain as a transport service is part of that security conversation. Yeah, well, to be sure. So that particular killer application blockchain to transport functions very much like a decentralized VPN. And our developers very proudly have been able to extract certain management overlay as well as security overlay from data transport itself. And to put this in an encrypted way on the blockchain. And what we've found is a much more efficient and highly secure way in which data can be transported. I think what Miande is doing is basically open the door for all the new applications that are going to benefit from that area and leveraging it to every different place. We're looking it into routing in our end. We're looking it into a calls disputes on our end. And you took it to the next step towards a actual connectivity and the amount of bandwidth use between users. So this is, I think, opening of a new complete era for this solution. I think you're right, Bo. What's fascinating about the problems that Miande is solving with his decentralized VPN is really segregation of our networks and access down to its core. It's being able to really concisely identify flows in our network and be able to detect anomalies, but also being able to provide that kind of data to other systems that we can leverage for preventative threats. One of the threats that Command sees a lot of is brute force attacks against hosts, but also account compromise. Think multi-regional or multi-data, even multi-cloud architectures that could leverage point-to-point routing or secure network transit, especially in a scalable and decentralized way, is definitely an advantage. That adversaries aren't just going to be able to take advantage of a mis-white-listed port or a mis-white-labeled service on a network. I love that real-life case study example. Can you guys also provide me one, Miande? Sure. We have, in fact, a hardcore AI company and several partners that are focusing on IoT that are really looking at our products and services in order to support data transport, but even a little bit more to just explain a little bit. We have a killer application called blockchain defined wide-air networking. Really, it's about finding a very secure way and efficient way to support cloud services as well as actual bandwidth. In fact, through the usage of smart contracts, we've been able to provide some folks in telecommunications considered to be the holy grail, which is real-time provisioning as well as pay-as-you-go for bandwidth. It's very different from the current model of how bandwidth is sold, but a lot of our strategic AI partners are looking at the fact that we can support a very efficient and secure way to support large volumes of data transport. We even have a pleasure of working with one client who's interested in our ability. We have a device called a load balancing gateway. It's a multi-chain solution that allows us to integrate with other blockchain-based solutions that focus on decentralized storage and even focus on decentralized compute. In one single scoop, we can provide them with a lot of these decentralized services. That's something that we're very excited about. I love that. BDWAN, Blockcase versus SDWAN. I love that. I'm sure transport will never be the same because of it. Boaz, what's your case in point for the sphere? Looking at the way that we basically integrated many of the things that Mayanda is doing and Jake is doing. It's exciting to see that there are other companies that are really hitting that area. In our platform, we first of all provide a fully global ecosystem which is a multi-cloud provider. Then within that, we do the routing and the settlements of the payments, of course. That's traditional, but also for the fraudulent and for the crisscross also the actual information going back and forth per each user. We can in real time provide them what actually happened and how it happened. It's in a fancy way no disputes. Then it takes you to the next level of being able to trade like a trade platform and not as the old ways of doing the trading over contracts. Many of the inefficiencies are being lifted, utilizing what is existing in the market, but leveraging it to a different place where you can take the idea of a blockchain and basically customize it to the best need of your service and then leveraging to it all the security means, do everything in real time, and we're talking again on massive amount of traffic that is going to be running through our platform and at the same time analyze it, flag what is problematic, and then block anything that is required, blocking many different levels of security if it's on the level of keeping everything that's possible private from basics, and then going down towards DDoS even on the level of the calls themselves, being able to block in a way without responding, and there's many, many ways of doing it to be efficient and not put yourself out as a target because once you're out you're a target, and if you answer you'll become even a bigger target, I think everyone is familiar with that, so in our case it's keeping the secure and the efficiency for the customers the highest value. So a modern day ARBANET that is high tech using blockchain AI to really decrease likelihood of fraud and really offer secure space to have that global ecosystem. Even much more with many, many more features in the working one. Very exciting, okay so Jake tell me what tips can you provide based on your experience here, your deployments, your analysis? I think really understanding the environment that you have to build is defining the building blocks of your business is going to kind of predicate the kind of controls that you need to look into. The tips that I often see is really having comprehensive understanding of the way services communicate and obviously leveraging things like traditional analysis tools, net flow, performance, rounding performance, things along those lines to really understand how services may interact, but then taking advantage of either models that you build yourself that may be supervised or unsupervised learning on a dataset that you've collected to either categorize the kind of traffic that you're leveraging in your networks to optimize them or to potentially flag fraudulent activity as well as was referring to. The tips that I often have are related to security implemented as early as you possibly can because the difficulty of adding security to a service that it may be multi-cloud is quite difficult. It's a huge engineering undertaking to really understand the controls that need to be added. Once a service is already leveraging traditional routing technology or traditional SD-WAN technology, I say traditional as Mayande said, it's one of those things that we've got to understand the way our systems work. By leveraging new modern technologies, we have the ability to do that, but it's also about understanding how network traffic and transit really applies to the host interaction itself. I think this is really where CMD comes into play. We provide context to what's actually going on within those encrypted, often tamper-proof connections on a network, and it's more understanding what's going on from a holistic perspective than point solutions around things like that. Maybe another tip is to investigate tooling that has very rich APIs or very much driven by service-to-service capabilities. Wouldn't it be excellent to be able to block a route or change a firewall rule based on the host interaction as opposed to simply having to block that host interaction on the system itself? Well said. Mayande, anything to add there in terms of tips? Well, one tip that I would advise, our CSO always makes the point that just about every industry we know will probably have a director of blockchain or a director of distributed budget technologies, which yield a garbage-in-garbage-out question. DLTs probably offer the best approach to ensure that the data which is fed into AI servers is valid and trusted. Because it's an immutable record, you have the best opportunity to ensure that the analytics are meaningful and truth-based. In addition, I think it's always important to test, test, test before you deploy. And then aside from that, another piece of advice I would certainly give is for those who haven't already begun to look at it, especially in the world of network infrastructure, open source. Open source is a very key open networking. I'm very proud that the platform that we've built is based on that, and we've been proponent to open source and open networking. And I think that's a powerful tip. Go, Al. Anything to add? Since we, in our case, it's very interesting because we're leveraging again to things from both what Jake and Mayande is talking about. So we did everything, all our infrastructure is as a code, and we're deployed on three different clouds in at least three regions on each with all the availability zones and so on. And we did take the area of security in advance, like Jake several times emphasized, which is absolutely right and absolutely agree. What I can see this with a lot as people that manage the teams, we often have the right ideas, but I think one of the best tips would be to get the best DevOps team in the market. And everything that we think to be able to be implemented the way we want, they have to be talented, but also open minded. And again, open source, open source, open source, and being able to adapt and change and think out of the box. So the main hardest task is to get those elite teams. And so that's put you to the diligence in that area. That's my tip. Yeah, and I feel there's a common thread here, right? As we're talking about AI and IoT, it really boils down to human talent and attention to what's important moving forward. So talking about moving forward, time for the crystal balls, gentlemen. What does the future look like for network automation and service design as you're supporting these big networks? Go ahead, do you want to go first? Sure. So the future holds many great things and technology was just reinvented again two, three years ago after over a decade, nothing was changed. I believe the reinvent cycle will keep shrinking and we'll have to adapt again to make even and become even more efficient. But for the time being, we're leading with the latest and greatest that's available right now to provide the best service we can. Jake, what's the future look like? I think we're going to go beyond just discovering topologies for security or compliance reasons and actually get into really interesting conversations about potential capacity planning, but not on a kind of micro scale on a macro scale. If we think about routes being improved between myself and San Francisco and Boas on the other side of the world, it's fascinating to think how telcos or large providers can take advantage of machine learning to plan networks. Capacity planning in the future is going to be something that I think will obviously be leveraged as a major part of it. But what would be interesting when cloud service providers can leverage AI between networks or between environments to detect and prevent compromised devices or threats in a global scale? We looked at major dynamic DNS service provider a number of years ago getting taken off the internet by an IoT-based or a device-based threat. Wouldn't it be incredible if we could distribute the news of this particular attack across hundreds or thousands of devices communicated to the upstream providers of those networks so we're not dealing with terabit per second threats, we're dealing with megabit per second threats. I'm really curious to see how we can leverage it as a community, share the information between multiple providers, but also take advantage of the fact that open sources is driven. We should be able to take the same kind of signatures and rules and apply them to our own networks as well as give them to our neighbors that we know and trust to take advantage of as well. Well said, Mandy. If only I had a crystal ball. Well, given that the number of connected devices that would be in use is estimated to reach $75 billion by 2025, we tend to think it's integral that all infrastructure should be looking towards decentralization. Today, we have amazing examples of network automation, some using machine learning that can use application-based predictive measures to determine and establish bandwidth requirements. That's something that we're using today and can provision on-the-fly circuits to support this bandwidth and even automatically tear down circuits when they're no longer needed. But in the future, these networks will become so complex that they will need to leverage AI in order to go beyond those predictive measures of a specific application. AI offers the opportunity within network infrastructure to look at the complete picture, much like Jake was saying. And with an understanding of the traffic impact that today is only handled in a reactive manner. So, yes, we're excited as well. And I have to say, we're here actively looking at predictive analysis and its application for marketing here at JSA and how we can better help support our clients and leverage the data. Data just sitting there is not good. Data that's productive and predictive. That's exciting. So, like you said, reactive sort of yesterday's world. So, we're very excited and learning so much from the way you gentlemen are leading your businesses. Thank you so much for all of your insight. Again, our all-star panelists here, Mr. Jake King, CEO of Command or CMD, Mr. Mayende Walker, CEO of Open Crypto Trust or Open CT, and Mr. Boaz Berfelli, VP of Operations and Engineering at The Sphere. All companies, if you haven't heard about them yet, make sure you're googling. This wraps up probably this virtual CEO roundtable. And come meet us in person, I should mention. We will have two of these companies, if not three, no pressure, and Jake, joining us November 6th to the 7th at Telecom Exchange in LA. Again, Mayende of Open CT and Yares, the city of The Sphere, will be joining us speaking live on blockchain technology and its impact on network infrastructure and more. So, exciting stuff. Limited C-level seats are available at thetelecomexchange.com. And to feature your thought leader right here next time on a monthly virtual CEO roundtable, give us a shout, PR at jsa.net. Thanks for tuning in to JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals, and JSA radio, your voice for tech and telecom. Until next time, happy networking.