David Jorm, senior manager of Product Security & Technology Services at IIX, Inc., spoke with theCUBE’s Jeff Frick on the floor of the OpenDaylight Summit about how to optimize peer-to-peer connections that underpin online networking.

“IIX, we’re calling it the software-defined interconnect company,” he said. “The idea is applying the concepts behind software-defined networking to establishing connections between different networks. So think about it, you’ve got a couple of big network operators, maybe you’ve got AT&T or Verizon, then you’ve got maybe Google or Facebook or LinkedIn that serves a lot of content to those networks. And they’d like to establish a direct connection from one network to the other so that an eyeball network can consume all the content from, say, a Cloud-service provider. And we’re automating the process of provisioning those connections.”

Many people don’t have any idea of the scale of peer-to-peer connections going on behind the scenes online. “Peering and what we’re calling direct interconnect is huge, so it’s where two networks connect to each other and exchange traffic without traversing the public internet,” Jorm told theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s Media production team. “And that’s actually how the core of the Internet is formed… . It’s a kind of hidden ecosystem, but it’s actually at the core of how the Internet functions.”

Reducing security vulnerabilities

Jorm specializes in security and played a big part in improving OpenDaylight’s security processes.

“I established the OpenDaylight security response team, documented a process, had the process ratified by the TSC [Technical Steering Committee], and now we’re executing it. So we have a really solid security response process that’s in place. If you report a vulnerability in OpenDaylight, we can keep it quiet, we can coordinate disclosure, we can ship a patch. That’s all there. The next step, though, is actually getting ahead of the game and establishing some proactive efforts. How can we reduce the risk of there being security vulnerabilities in the future?”

Watch the full interview with David Jorm below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of OpenDaylight Summit 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE