NetFoundry Launches Secure Cloud Network SDK

Cloud networking and security pioneer NetFoundry today at the Kubecon conference in San Diego launched a new developer platform to enable programmable, zero-trust security to be built into networks using application code.

The move adds momentum to the "infrastructure as code" trend, in which the goal is to help developers to use software development kits (SDK), application programming interfaces (APIs), and "Zero Trust Connnectors" to embed security and performance directly into applications, enabling the networking and security features to work across access platforms whether they be mobile, edge, IoT or service meshes in the cloud.

NetFoundry has announced that its Developer Platform is now generally available (GA), including open-source options. The company said that customer pilots and integrations included Microsoft Kaizala, Micron Authenta, Hitachi Enterprise Cloud, Codefresh.io, CloudBees, NetApp, Intel, NodeWeaver, LokBlok, OpenEMR, IMS Evolve, Dell, and leading blockchain, security, cloud, and IoT solutions.

"Our Developer Platform enables developers, network engineers, DevOps, and cloud teams to break through this barrier by programmatically controlling private, secure, high performance networking," said Galeal Zino, CEO of NetFoundry Inc.

One of the interesting implementations includes integration with hardware-based authentication with Micron, which would enable a dynamic network connections to be built that can provide additional security by using Micron's Authenta hardware-based security authentication product. This would enable, for example, an applications to be secured from the cloud to silicon.

“Micron Authenta-enabled flash and its security-as-a-service Key Management System (KMS) adds a trusted and hardware-based layer in the IoT device, delivering important safeguards for the NetFoundry platform,” said Jeff Shiner, director for IoT Security Solutions for Micron’s Embedded Business Unit in a company release. “Integrating Authenta APIs with NetFoundry’s platform allows customers to easily activate devices to secure silicon-to-cloud connections for edge and IoT workloads.”

Microsoft is also using the NetFoundry SDK to integrate with its Kaizala line of business applications. Microsoft says the NetFoundry SDK will enable secure connections to be established with Kaizala. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced NetFoundry as the only cloud native networking solution to be selected as a preferred partner for Office 365 optimization.

NetFoundry operates a network of cloud points of presence (PoP) that can establish secure network overlays, on demand, for cloud applications. Developers can use the network to build this cloud-based security and performance optimization directly into their applications. NetFoundry points out that this avoids the complexity of provisioning separate virtual private networks or more complicated schemes requiring network hardware configurations.

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