What’s the importance of providing detailed visibility into networks and the current challenges involved in doing that?
There are thousands of network observability companies out there providing alerts, metrics, logs and dashboards with data on IT infrastructure.
It’s hugely important to gain insight into the network and the issues it faces during this era of hyperconnectivity, amid an overwhelming volume of data produced across the IT ecosystem. Doing this can help to get the most out of infrastructure, while pinpointing threats to the network, inefficiencies and performance bottlenecks.
The problem is that traditional, outdated tools in the industry don’t provide insights that are actionable, resulting in a high mean time to resolution of problems that has not decreased much over time.
Why are insights from these services not actionable?
They often feed you lots of metrics and tell you a particular device such as the server is not responding. However, they don’t give you information on why it’s down, meaning you don’t know what exactly to fix or how, nor can you do it quickly.
For example, an organisation that finds a server is not responding may investigate and find that the server and the applications on it seem to be running as normal, by which time two hours have passed since the outage started. This may then be passed onto the networking team, which spends the same time again troubleshooting.
That team may then pass the issue onto the security team, which carries out further troubleshooting to eventually find out seven or eight hours after the problem was identified that it was all because a simple firewall change blocked access to the server. This kind of situation happens every single day in companies around the planet.
Can you explain a bit about WanAware and how it has sought to resolve these issues?
The premise behind WanAware, which was founded in 2020 in Boulder, Colorado, was to solve this core issue by providing actionable observability on infrastructure from a performance, availability and cybersecurity perspective.
We started by taking a different approach to everyone else. Instead of building massive data lakes first, we focused on building an inventory platform. We then created an observability platform on top that understands the interdependencies of components in the infrastructure, providing the context that is often lacking.
We now have an advanced intelligent observability platform, which launched early last year, incorporating over 10 trillion data points and applying AI, machine learning and advanced database infrastructure to contextualise information.
How does the company’s system pinpoint issues?
When an alert comes in, our platform quickly picks it up and identifies that an issue has, for example, affected a particular server that has a downstream dependency on a particular switch, router and firewall. It may look and find that all of these are operational, ascertaining that there must be a configuration problem instead.
The platform can then query the configurations and might figure out that the switching and routing ones are fine, but that the firewall configuration is not letting traffic through. The upshot is that seconds from the initial alert, the system has triaged, figured out the problem and come back to the user with a clear resolution. The security team may then make a change, with the system becoming operational again within minutes.
How do you see the platform growing into the future?
We’ve tried to be smart and patient about adding customers, focusing on adding the right ones at the right time. At present, we have about 50 large-sized customers, but this year, you’ll see us focus on adding large quantities of customers by opening up to the mid-market.
We currently have 400 in our funnel that we expect to onboard over the next six months or so, meaning that by ITW next year, we will have approximately 500 or more customers internationally.
Our expectation is that the platform will result in better customer experience across the board, resolving issues much faster and thus providing higher uptime. By knowing their inventory better, customers can not only understand what they have today, but there’s also really nothing holding them back from tomorrow.
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