 Welcome. Thank you for joining us for this JSA TV interview. I'm Greg Elliott, VP of Business Development with 1623 Fartum. With us today is Mike Rockwell. He is the Global Head of Solution Architects with Megaport. Thanks for joining us today, Mike. I'm super excited about this conversation, so really appreciate it. Yeah, me too. It's great to be here with yourself and JSA TV. For the viewers and yourself out there, I do use a lot of hand motions and expressions. This is a video production, so I'm not having a medical event, just forewarning here. I always like to get that out of the way because it can be good. No. Good generation. I speak with my hands to you, so I get it. So let's jump into it. So over the last however long, we've had multiple, multiple conversations with customers, central customers, industry experts about cybersecurity and how the network is a key component to that. Can you shed some light on how Megaport could be used as a tool in that fight for better network security? Yeah, that's a great question. I think anytime we're onboarding a customer, the first thing that comes up is they want to validate our security profile, right? So we're diving straight into the questionnaires or asking 100 questions, right? So they always want to validate that we're a secure option for their network. A little just to kind of preface about what Megaport does, we're a global network as a service provider. So primarily customers are building on-demand private connectivity from data center to the cloud. Certainly there's other ways that customers utilize the network, but we are a network as a service provider. When it comes to security, it's kind of interesting. I think there's three things that come to mind in our conversations. One is simplicity, another one is control, and another is flexibility. So when I talk about simplicity, it is still shocking. The term network sprawl comes to mind quite often. We'll get on the phone with the customer, we'll start talking about their cloud connectivity strategy, and they'll pull up a Vizio diagram, right? And this thing looks like a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. I want to throw the sauce on the screen and start soaking it up, right? But one of the issues with that is they start to dig deeper and we're strictly talking about kind of the data center to the cloud connectivity portion and the conversational progress into, hey, what are we using this link for? What are we using this link for? What's this connected to? What resources ultimately are we trying to reach from this location to this location? And that's a huge security risk, right? If we don't know what network links we're using for one, that's an issue. If we don't know what endpoints ultimately they're connecting to, that's an issue as well. So when I talk about simplicity and really in the form of Megaport, a lot of it comes back into they want to take control of that network infrastructure and they want to be able to manage it from a single platform. Really a lot of the same conversations around SD-WAN where they're taking their control of their network, they have a management platform, able to push down all their policies through their controller to all their edge devices and have that single platform for management and bringing that into the kind of network connectivity model. That's one of the easy resources that Megaport provides is that management console where they can see all those network connections and see the endpoints ultimately they're connected to. The other piece is control. So Megaport, we operate a private network that any endpoint from A to B that the customer is connecting to. It's over Megaport's private layer two network. So they know exactly from point A to point B that it's routing across a private platform. We're not handing it off to a third party provider or routing it over the internet. So really we're taking the, giving the customer control to route the traffic how they like over a transparent connection. The next piece is flexibility. In the world today with the distributed applications, distributed users, we wanna have the flexibility to make it, make change at a moment's notice, right? So that old traditional architecture of waiting 30, 60 days, you know, that's just doesn't work anymore. So they wanna have that flexibility. From a pure security standpoint, some of the key things that we're seeing Macsec comes up right of it, right? We're providing a layer two transport across our network. So Macsec being a layer two encryption or security protocol. A couple of the cloud providers, AWS and Azure specifically come to mind. They offer it over their dedicated connectivity model for their private connections and express route and direct connect. So we're helping customers to facilitate those connections today. And that's definitely a huge topic. It sits outside of kind of that standard partner model, but certainly gives the customer that simplicity and control. The other piece is Sassy. I'm sure is, I think there's a recent nanog event, my guess is that, you know, secure access service edge was top of mind. They talked about it quite a bit. Yeah, I'm sure they did. And, you know, we're getting involved in some of those Sassy solutions as well. So we have a Megaport virtual edge that allows customers to deploy virtual network functions on Megaport compute. And then they have the benefit of building out the private connectivity from the data centers like 1623 Farnum, your data center to the cloud providers, but also integrating that underlay into their SUN overlay. And where that really comes into play from a security perspective is now they're able to build out these virtual pops. So maybe you have a customer that's there in 1623 Farnum, they don't have a data center presidents or a president that sits within Europe, they can deploy an MVE and essentially turn up a Sassy pop where they're able to incorporate their network as a service and security as a service on one central platform. And that's integrated with their SD-WAN providers. So Cisco, Fortnite, and Versa are some of the folks that we're working with. So, you know, those are some of the ways that, you know, we at Megaport, you know, address them a customer to security concerns. That's great.