NaaS Player Meter Teams With Cloudflare To Bake DNS Security In Network Infrastructure

“[The] offering will really help manage global corporate policies across all sorts of spaces and what’s really unique is Cloudflare powers over 20 percent of the internet, they see trillions of queries a day and they have a really robust engine to understand bad actors across several layers and help protect with malware and unwanted threats. That’s going to be entirely integrated into our hardware, routing, switching, wireless and in our software,” Meter’s CEO told CRN.

Anil Varanasi, CEO and co-founder of Meter

Network-as-a-service company Meter is teaming up with security and performance services player Cloudflare for the introduction of a new content filtering tool for enterprises.

Meter DNS (Domain Name System) Security can help businesses manage and enforce global corporate policies across a variety of spaces, such as office campuses, schools and warehouses. The tool removes the need for IT teams to work with multiple vendors for content filtering across several layers, Anil Varanasi, CEO and co-founder of Meter, told CRN.

“[The] offering will really help manage global corporate policies across all sorts of spaces and what’s really unique is Cloudflare powers over 20 percent of the internet, they see trillions of queries a day and they have a really robust engine to understand bad actors across several layers and help protect with malware and unwanted threats,” Varanasi said. “That’s going to be entirely integrated into our hardware, routing, switching, wireless and in our software.”

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The latest offering will give businesses “first of a kind” DNS response times and can optimize network performance by limiting access to high-bandwidth websites and services, including filtering high bandwidth activities like video streaming to optimizing network performance for warehouses, or helping businesses maintaining security and compliance standards by filtering malicious or illegal content, the company said.

“Having to buy another SKU for DNS security, DNS filtering, content filtering; that gets expensive. And it’s also very time consuming to actually integrate this across locations everywhere and in different types of spaces to get it all working seamlessly. This will really reduce the hassle while also better protect [a company], all within one platform,” Varanasi said.

Meter DNS Security will be rolled out to the company’s customers as an upgrade, he added.

Meter got its start in 2015 providing internet infrastructure for business users. The company specializes in hardware and software operations by building routing, switching and wireless infrastructure and then deploying and maintaining the infrastructure for its customers. Meter’s target customers are those that are actively growing and need their infrastructure to scale along with them, Varanasi said.

“The best way to think about what we do is similar to how AWS made it really easy for anybody to spin up compute without having to spend a lot of time or capital. That’s what we do for local infrastructure,” he said.

The company considers many of the historically hardware-focused networking companies to be its competitors, but many of these players have had to “bolt on” the as a Service business model after the fact. But increasingly, customers are looking at NaaS to scale their businesses, Varanasi said.

“[Many] customers are still having to do all the legacy work of buying a bunch of hardware, integrating it, having to upgrade it, and then maintain it and the security updates for all it. And we see this across industries. Today, we might be competing with customers having hold on to other hardware and software just to get great security and they might have millions of square feet and thousands of devices on the network. That’s the kind of thing we help make better.”

Varanasi said that Meter DNS Security will be available via the channel at a later date.

“I think ultimately where we see this going is exactly the way AWS played out and really having this big toolkit for the channel to be able to provide a great service,” he said. “I think the channel is really great because they really know the end customers and care about the outcomes for the end customers. And what we see is Meter being a really great part of that toolkit.”