What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Security, Multi-Cloud, and the Future of Enterprise Networks
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
The digital infrastructure landscape has fundamentally changed. What was once a simple utility—broadband connectivity—has evolved into a strategic asset requiring sophisticated architecture, security considerations, and specialized expertise. In this insightful conversation with James Coberly CTO/ COO of Massive Networks, we explore why the traditional carrier-customer relationship must evolve to meet modern business demands.
James brings 35+ years of telecommunications experience to bear on the challenges facing today's MSPs and enterprises. He articulates a vision where carriers serve as true partners rather than mere vendors, providing not just connectivity but engineering support, design consultation, and ongoing relationship management. This approach addresses a critical gap in the market, where technical professionals often find themselves without adequate carrier support to properly implement and maintain complex network environments.
Security emerges as a central theme throughout our discussion. As James poignantly observes, "The network is the forgotten, redheaded stepchild. Sometimes when you're talking about security, everybody's worried about the front door. But once the front door is open, how far can they go?" This perspective highlights the necessity of proper network segmentation, with business networks isolated from guest access and IoT deployments. By treating the internet as the "unprotected cousin" it truly is, organizations can build more resilient architectures that limit potential damage from breaches.
The conversation also tackles the complexities of multi-cloud connectivity, where organizations need seamless access to AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and other providers without sacrificing security or performance. Massive Networks' approach includes cloud router services and private connectivity options that eliminate internet exposure while maintaining flexibility. For MSPs supporting clients across diverse environments, this capability proves particularly valuable.
Whether you're an MSP looking to enhance your service offerings or an enterprise rethinking your network strategy, this episode provides practical insights on segmentation, isolation, and future-proofing your digital infrastructure. Don't miss our closing thoughts on micro-segmentation as a security strategy and the importance of designing networks with containment in mind from day one.
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Hey everybody, interesting chat today around why broadband isn't just broadband anymore and how massive networks are shaking up, how MSPs think about carriers and connectivity. James, how are you?
Speaker 2:Good. How are you doing, Evan?
Speaker 1:I'm doing great. Thanks for being here Longtime fellow telecom and networking geek, so looking forward to geeking out with you. Before that, maybe introduce yourself, and how do you describe Massive Networks these days?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm James Corbally, cto of Massive Networks. I come from 35 plus years of IT and telecom from the dawn of. You know the unfortunate fax machine tech to you know on up, and you know, as I've learned over decades of networking and experience, that you know we've always had our battles with technologies, things like that, adoption of technologies, understanding technologies. New stuff comes out. You can't get information on it. How do I use it? How do I? What do I do with it? Where's my, where's my owner's manual for this cool thing you just sold me? Well, that leads us a little further into massive networks, massive networks. We're pretty much a full-service telecom, but our priority focus really is on not just having you have a circuit and a solution. It's having a relationship as a partner in your process versus being a vendor to you. Our engineering is included. Our monitoring and network services are included. Network operation center is generally happy to talk to people. Support desk is the same. They love to hear somebody call them. Just trying to upend the relationship side of the entire organization, we provide a high performance network internet, private networking, e-wan, e-lan, cloud compute access, things like that. And again, not always do you understand how to mix and match and do what you want with it. And at any point in time our engineering crew can jump in and happy to talk and discuss layouts, structures. You know proper ip solutions, how to use what you want to do. Make sure you've got an industry standard best practice applied. You know, you've all.
Speaker 2:Your layer two is separated properly. Your layer three is properly isolated and firewalled. You've got, you know, proper east-west redundancies, whatever you may need, depending on your platform. And that's on the basis of. You know, we're the professionals in the industry but we haven't been great at sharing how and what to do with it and how to use it properly. You can learn how to program a Juniper. You can learn how to program a Cisco, but understanding how that all applies in the real world doesn't always come through the book or through the training course, and that's where our engineering team and deep experience comes into play on that side. And then we head up the same thing after sales customer service support, dedicated account manager, making sure that whatever you need, if you don't understand how you're driving it, still something goes on. We're there in support of the product all the way through the life of it.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. Yeah, let's talk about carrier partnerships. They've always been kind of messy historically. We probably have to break a lot of old habits and old models. So what you're doing maybe describe how and what made you need to flip the script on the way carriers have always behaved and worked.
Speaker 2:Well, it depends on which side of the carrier channels you're talking about. Direct services. The carriers have always been the resource that you had. There was nobody else there. Now there's getting to be competition in certain areas, but still it's buy it from us. You've got nobody else to go to. And then you had the attitude of support and service afterwards, and a lot of times you're just getting the same old stuff down the street. You know again, broadband versus dedicated internet access. Broadband's a shared environment with a lower SLA. Dedicated internet access is a much higher SLA and it's not a shared environment. It's essentially data center grade bandwidth delivered to your location.
Speaker 2:You didn't have a great selection of things to do. You didn't have great support. You didn't have well, you had to do. You didn't have great support. You didn't have well, you had customer service. Sign the deal, sign the deal, sign the deal. And then after that it was okay, hurry up and wait for delivery and installation and all the processes.
Speaker 2:So we've tried to take every pain across the board that we've experienced. As you say, our sales team, our executive team, our technical team, all of those groups have decades and decades of experience in telecom and we've all sort of vowed to ourselves and to the company that we don't want to be that way. We want to be involved, you know, understanding and work with the group, because it's frustrating to be on the far side and not understand how and what's going on. So, as I say, we've got fully encompassed provisioning teams that work hand-in-hand with the customer on how things are going. We've got turn-up teams that work with them on the physical turn-up of IP cloud services, things like that. The physical turnip of IP cloud services, things like that. We've got 24-7 support that is happy to pick up the phone and answer questions on anything you may want to do in the middle of the night. All the things that frustrated us we've just tried to eliminate. So it's hard to say, there's hundreds and hundreds of little cliche things that we've just no, we can't, we can't, we can't.
Speaker 1:It's got to be a partnership with the customer, not a vendor relationship to a customer. Got it and you're doing stellar work with MSPs, who are really on fire. The business model is now settled on MSPs for so many services, and yet the underlying connectivity is still like a checkbox. Why is that mindset challenging for MSPs?
Speaker 2:Again, in the MSP world you've been the technical pro supporting your client and you didn't have support for the product you were trying to sell. A lot of times you didn't have definitive support. Nobody had your back. And again, you know, the same way our engineering team and our support teams are is we have to have your back. You're the, you're the guy in the field that is working the service technically, the support person for this customer. This is a relation to it and you know, if there's an issue, we should be jumped to the ready to make sure that you've got everything you need to solve the issue. Whether it's our problem or it's not really our problem, it's something you're experiencing in the layer three internet world. Whatever it may be, we've got engineering resources available to help figure it out for you or with you. You know, again, we like to be more of the educational side of things. On networking, it's a customer should be involved in what's going on to the best of their understanding, to try and you know again, teach them the better. Msp is the same way. We've got a team that does nothing but pre-design analysis. Give us the idea of the network you're looking for. We'll draw it out on the national map or the international map and then we'll overlay. Suggested layer three ip architectures. Say you want to replace mpls with ethernet? Well, here's an ip architecture for an ospf network to replace mpls with ethernet.
Speaker 2:You know, try and again they, they can see somewhere they want to go with their customer, maybe they don't have. You know, try and again, they, they can see somewhere they want to go with their customer, maybe they don't have. You know the comfort level with the technologies to do it. And again, it's not about how to program each piece, it's how does it all work together? You know what. What happens here. How do you get your layer three on top of your layer two private network to architecture things appropriately with proper? You know ewan, redundancies, things like that, and uh, you know I can't expect everybody to understand that. Everybody has their group of verticals that they're really good in and sometimes this is the needed tool that they just need access to. In the MSP world we're finding great traction on working with them, on just being somebody that's supportive you know white glove style service.
Speaker 1:Love it. White gloves. You don't see those men anymore. Used to see them a lot, but they're figurative white gloves. I'm guessing you're not actually wearing white gloves? No, no, no, not today.
Speaker 2:I do have leather gloves.
Speaker 1:That's a different service yes, so talk about security. I mean, it's a real headache, it's a real challenge getting the architecture and network segmentation right. And how do you make security more accessible and understandable for MSPs, who may not have a whole big in-house security team?
Speaker 2:Well, we, way out of the box box, treat Internet like it is. It's an unprotected cousin that you know. This could do anything. You may not understand, but our product offering our one pipe into your facility and then your primary service is DIA. Or you need Internet but you use SD-WAN and you've got all these other services. Well, we'll work with you in engineering to essentially privatize your SD-WAN links between your offices and remote facilities facilities. That way it's isolated, layer to point-to-point transit or EWAN style transit, thus reducing your need for internet services over the top, unless you want to use them for a failover.
Speaker 2:The same thing on the internet world. Hey, we have a business network, we have a guest network and we have an IoT network. Well, great, here's an internet service dedicated for your business network. Here's one dedicated for your guests, isolated from the first one. Here's one for IoT. It's only 10 megs and it's isolated from all of them. You know again the architecture of the solution that you can bring into a facility over a single fiber pair or over multiple fiber pairs. When you're building a ring. Really, you know the, the services and how you slice and dice them helps your base architecture of your network.
Speaker 2:You know, I've said a couple times, the network is, uh, you know, forgotten, redheaded, stepchild. Sometimes when you're talking about security, everybody's worried about the front door. But once the front door is open, how far can they go, where you know? So we, we work, you know, I say, with their teams, on proper ip and layer 3 designs. That way you've got segmentation, micro segmentation. If your team can support that level of firewall and things like that Suggested best practices, management, out-of-band networks, again, we'll let our carrier expertise trickle down into your local network so you can learn and grow with it to scale.
Speaker 1:Sounds fantastic and most customers aren't living in one cloud anymore. Increasingly, it's a multi-cloud world, a lot of hybrid cloud, private cloud instances. How do you help these like connect all the dots between AWS or Azure or Google Cloud or Oracle or whoever they might be using?
Speaker 2:Well, in our sales force we've got a sales engineering team which can work with you. Massive ourselves has multiple paths and on-ramps to almost every cloud provider that's out there, even the new digital realm, 3d providers, things like that. Multi-cloud environment just involves proper network design. Again, again at the layer three architecture how are you going to interconnect what type routing, what type services, things that they might be comfortable with but not quite comfortable with because of the, the design architecture involved? Our engineering team or our pre-sales engineering team will step in, give them suggested known engineering solutions. We can white glove it without any issue to you know here. Let's sign an NDA, give us some information about how your architecture is currently and we'll work with a solution that works into your architecture without any changes between you your cloud, your Oracle cloud instance, your AWS instance, things like that.
Speaker 2:If needed, we offer a cloud router service also. So if you're not capable of handling that in the simplistic side, or even in the more advanced side, or you're not comfortable with it, step on with our engineering team and we'll put a cloud router in the more advanced side, or you're not comfortable with it, step on with our engineering team and we'll put a cloud router in the middle of the service for you, help you manage that cloud route service between you and your facilities. So you've got again ease of operations all the way through on the service. And then you know, for the MSPs environment, we we stay in our lane. We're we're carriers. We're really good at being a carrier. Let's stay being really good at being a carrier. You know it's uh, as I say, partnering with an MSP in the in the open environment is a perfectly happy. Again, we're technological resources on the network side. We're not here to try and push firewalls or vendors or anything else.
Speaker 1:Good to hear let's talk a little bit about your footprint. I'm here in boston. There's lots of options and connectivity. It's a surplus of even residential options with fixed wireless. Now you're out West traditionally less choice, but all the excitement that seems to be deploying new options in rural areas. What does your footprint look like and how do you see it?
Speaker 2:Well, we service over the fiber optic networks. We have about 22 million accessible buildings here in the US. We're actually directly interconnected with 152 carriers currently in North America, several in Europe and the Asia-Pac markets, but primarily our biggest footprint is North America. Again, we're here to be the carrier interleave so we can provide services coast to coast. Um, we can do private line services between uh a Lumen circuit and Verizon back East without any problem.
Speaker 2:We can do wind stream. We support every underlying carriers, fiber optic service that meets our qualifications which there's, you know, quite a few so far and over that network, what we do is we use them to get to your facility and it's essentially the physical pipe you know, think of it as the conduit or the drinking straw and inside that we actually build an ethernet architecture to our edge device and we deliver independent, isolated services. Here's your internet service, one, two, three. Here is your private line EWAN service. Here is a 100 meg connection to AWS. Here's a 100 meg connection to AWS. Here's a 100 meg connection to Azure. Here's a 100 meg connection to Google Cloud. Here's cloud route services.
Speaker 2:Again, all delivered independently, isolated on Ethernet, but as independent services to the customer's premise. So you can take a single port out, you can do hybrid trunking out, you can isolate port by port by port, and we support services anywhere from pretty much 100 meg through 400 gig. Now, again, we've got a 100 gig client site, nid, and we've got a couple of sites that we're working on 400 gig NIDs for. So, depending on what your service architecture is or your accessibility in the rural market area for fiber, if you've only got you know one local provider. Well, we'll help the local provider, we'll buy the service from the local provider underneath and then we'll inject the as I like to say, the champagnes down the line for you and then we do all interactions at the lower level. We are the carrier of record end-to-end, so it's again treated as an in-network, on-network massive service all the way to your location.
Speaker 1:Wow, interesting. So, as CTO, how do you think about future-proofing your network? You've got all these new workloads coming on stream IoT and Edge, and even my home office studio here. I thought a gig, oh, that'll be fine forever. I'm already looking at ways I need to expand for what I do, and the MSPs are expanding. How do you see yourself continuing to be able to help them over the next couple of years?
Speaker 2:Well, again, a big part of it is isolation and segmentation, proper identification, the use of traffic. Not everything needs to talk to everything. You and I grew up in a day where it just went on the land and everything was on the land. Yeah, you know, and it was, you know, and that was the way it's been treated for a long time. Then you, if you start architecting and the hardest part is going backwards, you know you're, you're growing so fast, you're doing things. Oops, we didn't do this. Now we've got to try and figure out how to, without causing any issues, re-architect something to provide the isolation that we should have put in place. If you have any chance at all, if you're planning anything new, start today, you know, look at what you're doing and look at ways that you can independently isolate, if not each service, at least each server and each group in that, and say, okay, that these don't need to talk there.
Speaker 2:Um, architecturally, I can think of, like our uh sql servers in our one of our clusters. They have five different interfaces and there's a management. There's a private network between the SQLs for clustering, replication. There's one for access, for client accesses, there's one for back-end management and monitoring. Everything's independently isolated. If you're dealing with your own private networks, you've got lots of space to play with and a little bit of pre-designed architecture. You can do some really neat things with Layer 2 and VLANs and Layer 3. That can just put the baselines in place to manage proper accessibility.
Speaker 2:If you look at the cloud, say. Cloud and front door is a whole other thing. The less your corporate architecture relies on the internet, the less your exposure is to that same service. So if you've got cloud architectures and you're using VPN to get to them, look at a private cloud connection that eliminates that crossing the internet potential. And you're using VPN to get to them, look at a private cloud connection that eliminates that crossing the internet potential. Not that there's a man in the middle problem, but there's latency issues, there's packet loss and eventually, as AI moves forward, potentially a man in the middle problem, if somebody can packet capture enough.
Speaker 1:Yes, lots of roadblocks to worry about, speaking of which. One final piece of advice you know so many enterprises, msps, treat connectivity as an afterthought, and I see that because I have a daily live stream video show like this and you can tell we have perfect latency and jitter or you know, but you'd be amazed how many you know folks sitting in their corporate network 1080p little live stream here and they have issues and challenges.
Speaker 1:These are Fortune 1000 kind of companies. What's one piece of advice you could give them to rethink the way they do things today?
Speaker 2:Again, you know, don't be afraid to change. Look at your architectures, look at your serviceability, look at how you're connecting things and then look at is that the best way to connect things? Again, it's pretty simple. There's a lot of environments where, as you grow up in a network, you just keep adding PCs to the VLAN. Well, have you got a chatty VLAN? I've got all these PCs. Let's say it's just a couple hundred, but those couple hundred talk a lot.
Speaker 2:Why do they need to talk to each other? Again, at consumer level or at desktop level? Isolate a lot of that communication. Desktop level isolate a lot of that communication. Or is there other things you can do to segment departments from departments, groups from groups, things like that, where again, you can apply even stricter rules at the inside. My network firewalling level, you know, because they have to have a reason to attach to accounting. No, they don't get to accounting, they can't even see those networks or those services. So again, top to bottom, not just the front door and everything outside the front door, but look at what happens if you get a brief At that point you know, again, it's preventative.
Speaker 2:How far can they go? Where can they go If they come in here. That should be one of our most protected coveted areas. Nobody ever goes there, okay, great. Well, it should be almost impenetrable, isolated from any other system on your network. At the receptionist desk. Somebody happens to get in there, what can the receptionist get to? And again you might have to look at firewall micro-segmentation for services. Again, penetration isn't just the internet in, it's all physical environments. And then again the breadth of what they can access once they get there.
Speaker 1:Well, so much insight, so much experience. This is why I'm not worried about AIs stealing our jobs. You just have a wealth of information and knowledge and thanks for joining and sharing. Appreciate the time.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you for having me, Evan.
Speaker 1:And thanks everyone for listening, watching, sharing this episode, and be sure to check out our new show on Fox Business and Bloomberg TV at techimpacttv. Thanks everyone, thanks James.
Speaker 2:Thanks, evan, have a good day, take care.