Graphiant’s Secure Network as a Service (NaaS) Review & Demo | Niche Dominance

Your company needs to connect cloud applications faster and at a lower cost, needs tight control over where your data travels, or needs to give an outside business access to one specific application without exposing your entire network.

In this video, I cover Graphiant’s unique network as a service solution, including their data sovereignty controls, AI application governance, express route gateway services, and B2B data exchange, and explain the features that give them real niche dominance for companies with these specific requirements.

About Me

Mike Smith has been helping companies select the best telecom, WAN, security, and cloud services since 1999. He founded AeroCom in 2003, and has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards, including being recognized as one of the top 40 business people in tech-heavy Orange County, CA. Follow Mike on YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and SpiceWorks.

Transcript

Your company needs to connect cloud applications faster and at a lower cost, needs tight control over where your data travels, or needs to give an outside business access to one specific application without exposing your entire network.
In this video, I cover Graphiant’s unique network as a service solution and the features that give them real niche dominance for companies with these specific requirements.
Want more information or a demo on Graphiant for your company? Ask me today.

My Recommendation

If this video sparks your interest in Graphiant and you want more information, a demo tailored to your business, or pricing, do not contact Graphiant directly. Send me an email or give me a call at 714.593.0011. I will connect you with Justin and his team at Graphiant, the best team to work with there. You will get better pricing, better people to work with, and I will oversee the entire process. I am a broker for all the major network as a service and SASE solution providers in the industry, I have been doing this for over 20 years, and it will not cost your company anything. Join the thousands of other companies who have used me to help their company make a better decision in a fraction of the time. Also do not forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel and go check out AeroComInc.com.

What Is Graphiant’s Network as a Service Solution?

Graphiant is a relatively new player in the network as a service space, and it is a strong fit for several specific scenarios. If your company needs to connect to cloud applications faster and at a lower cost, needs cloud to cloud connectivity, operates in a highly regulated industry requiring deep visibility into data in motion, micro segmentation, data assurance, or data sovereignty, or needs to provide outside businesses access to specific applications or services, Graphiant is likely one of the most elegant and lowest cost solutions on the market for your situation.

Graphiant can handle standard SD-WAN and SASE functions like the vendors I cover in other videos, but if your company meets the requirements above, Graphiant offers features that frankly none of the other vendors match, or at least not to the same depth.

The Basics: What You Need to Know Upfront

Graphiant runs on a global private backbone network with points of presence worldwide, putting them in a similar category to vendors like Cato Networks or Aryaka. Their solution is software based, meaning it can run on any hypervisor environment, VMware, or commodity hardware your company already has. Graphiant considers themselves an unmanaged NOC and an unmanaged SOC, and they offer an open API, so everything you see in their platform can be exported into a third party SIEM environment.

Data Assurance: Visibility Into Data in Motion

Graphiant uses metadata to compile intent based data as it flows across your network in real time. In one environment I reviewed, Graphiant had analyzed over 4 million data flows, identified 4,000 applications, and detected 15 threats, categorized by type including malicious spam, parked sites, suspicious activity, phishing, and plagiarism.

Clicking into a specific threat shows a threat score, a full report on global impact and known threat actors, and a complete topology view showing exactly which site, IP address, and port the threat touched, along with the ISP it came through and the time it occurred. From there you can block that specific IP, URL, or threat category at the network level and push that block out to every enterprise site in a single action.

Graphiant’s custom alarm center lets you build notification rules for specific threat types and push that data into your SIEM or ticketing system automatically through webhooks. Instead of paying for separate visibility upsells from every individual vendor you already use, like Fortinet, Cisco, cloud applications, or AI tools, Graphiant gives you real time data in motion visibility across all of your applications, devices, and network in a single platform.

AI Application Governance

Graphiant also provides full visibility into every AI application running on your network, broken down by approved versus shadow AI (unapproved AI tools employees are using without authorization). You can block any application directly from this view.

Looking at a recent week of data in one environment showed 78 AI tools used by 48 users, 168 GB of data transmitted, 969 tokens used, and 73 of those tools flagged as shadow AI. You can drill down by top tools, top users, usage by site or department, and token consumption, giving IT departments a level of AI governance visibility that is genuinely hard to find anywhere else in one place.

Assured Application Management and Data Sovereignty

For companies in highly regulated industries that need specific applications to only travel to certain places, through certain paths, or touch certain users or sites, Graphiant’s assured application management tools are built for exactly that.

Selecting a specific application shows its full topology: everywhere that data has traveled, who produced it, who consumed it, and every hop along the way, down to link statistics like data loss, latency, and jitter. Drilling into an individual session shows the complete path, for example a site connecting through Graphiant’s software edge, handed to an ISP circuit, routed through the nearest Graphiant point of presence, and ultimately consumed at a cloud environment like AWS, with full detail on latency, packet loss, jitter, and every hop in between.

That after the fact visibility is useful for troubleshooting and avoiding finger pointing between teams or vendors. But Graphiant also lets you prevent problems before they happen. For an application carrying sensitive data, you can enforce compliance rules dictating exactly which sites, LAN segments, and geographic boundaries that data is allowed to touch, including prebuilt options like US only for HIPAA compliance, EU only for GDPR, APAC only, or various transatlantic and transpacific combinations.

This is a meaningful differentiator. Most SASE and SD-WAN solutions route traffic based on speed alone, meaning your data might pass through a country you never intended without your knowledge or control. Other vendors can offer similar data sovereignty controls, but usually only through expensive bolt on add ons. Graphiant includes this capability standard, and you can configure it in a handful of clicks.

The Unmanaged NOC Side: Network and Hardware Visibility

Graphiant’s site health dashboard gives you a color coded view of every site’s health. Drilling into a suboptimal site shows issues broken down by category: issues, data plane, control plane, and system, including hardware level detail like unresolved sensor alarms, QoE problems from data loss, latency, or jitter, and device level metrics like CPU, memory, disk, and temperature, even though Graphiant does not provide the hardware itself.

Drilling into an individual device shows model, software version, uptime, circuit details, top applications and top talkers at that site, circuit health, circuit utilization, and interface level detail including which interfaces are up or down along with their IP and MAC addresses.

SD-WAN Capabilities

One of Graphiant’s founders also co-founded Viptela, so it is no surprise their SD-WAN configuration tools are strong, including site management, device management, system objectives, and routing policy controls for things like failover routes.

Gateway Services: Express Routes in Minutes

Graphiant’s gateway services let you configure an express route to any cloud application in minutes or hours rather than weeks. Setting one up involves selecting the destination region and cloud provider, choosing your LAN segment and speed, and in a platform like Azure, selecting Graphiant as your express route provider, entering your service key and any peering VLAN IDs, and applying routing policies. The gateway is typically operational the same day and always within 24 hours.

This eliminates the usual tradeoff between connecting every site individually to a cloud provider through an expensive VPN, or routing all traffic back through a single connected site. With Graphiant, every site gets access to that express route in a few clicks, and the same capability works cloud to cloud as well, for example connecting an Azure application directly to an AWS application with full visibility and data sovereignty controls applied to that traffic.

B2B Data Exchange

If your company needs to give an outside business access to one specific application or service without exposing any other part of your network, Graphiant calls this B2B data exchange, and it is one of their standout capabilities.

The setup process involves configuring the service or application you want to share, creating a profile for the outside business or user, and connecting the two. The outside party receives an email invitation, and once approved, they get a configuration they can paste into their own device or firewall to establish a secure tunnel into that one specific service, nothing more. You retain full visibility into the data being exchanged, who is consuming it, from which sites and regions, and how much data has moved over time, all fully auditable.

This replaces tools like Alkira, Palo Alto’s Prisma Access, or Cisco AnyConnect for this specific use case, and in my opinion, it is a cleaner and faster way to accomplish it. A lot of customers sign up with Graphiant for this capability alone.

What Exactly Is Graphiant?

Graphiant does not fit neatly into either the SASE or SD-WAN category. It is best described as a secure network fabric that enables cloud to cloud and site to cloud connectivity with full visibility into data in motion, data sovereignty controls, data assurance, and business to business data exchange.

What Graphiant Is Not

Graphiant is not a full featured SASE solution in the way I cover other vendors in my videos. They do offer ZTNA and some firewall as a service capability, but not the full breadth of a complete secure service edge platform. What Graphiant does exceptionally well is give you the visibility and the data, which you can then push through webhooks into your SIEM or use with your other existing security tools to take action.

Ideal Customer Profile for Graphiant

Graphiant is the strongest fit for companies that connect remote sites to public cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, Google, or Oracle, want to reduce licensing costs on OEM firewalls and SD-WAN, are cloud native or multi tenant organizations, have multiple lines of business, are private equity or VC backed with an acquisition heavy growth strategy, operate in highly regulated industries like healthcare or financial services, serve industrial or SLED customers, are mid market to enterprise sized, or are MSPs serving their own customer base.

Want a Demo or Quote on Graphiant?

If you want more information, a demo, or pricing to see if Graphiant is the right fit for your organization, send me an email or give me a call at 714.593.0011. Do not call Graphiant directly. I will introduce you to my guy over there, Justin, and his team of fantastic engineers, and oversee the pricing process to make sure your company gets the best deal available. If there are other solutions worth comparing side by side with Graphiant, I can recommend those too. I am a broker for all the major network as a service and SASE solution providers in the industry, I have been doing this for over 20 years, and it will not cost your company anything. Don’t forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel and check out AeroComInc.com. Thanks for watching. I will catch you on the next one.