What is an infrastructure for the 21^st Century? According to Amir Khan, founder, president and CEO of Viptela, Inc., from the Internet and connectivity perspective, the industry is at what he calls the “railroad stage,” and we need to get to the “airplane stage” in order to support the enterprise of the future.

Khan joined John Walls (@johnwalls21) and Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), host and guest host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during VMworld 2016 US, taking place at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, NV, to provide his vision for the infrastructure for the 21^st Century.

Khan explained that talking to customers today is vastly different from even three years ago. Back then, customers didn’t want their information in the cloud.

However, today, with Office 365, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and various other systems burdening the infrastructure, he asked, “Do you try to expand within the current way of doing things, which was done for the physical infrastructure, or do you build your infrastructure for the cloud era?”

A fresh start

As a startup, Viptela started with a “clean sheet” and built its infrastructure to support the new applications anywhere it is with security and elasticity.

“The consumers of applications and sources of applications have become mobile, so in order to accommodate that you need the 21st Century infrastructure,” Khan explained.

Security checkpoints

Viptela boasted secure extensible network solution components, and security is top of mind for Khan. He feels the industry needs to start looking at security differently. The company offers active monitoring of all activity by default. The company puts controls on all entry and exit points of its network.

Comparing cybersecurity to travel security is one way to look at it. “If we have many, many roads all over the country, you need to put monitoring stations on each one of those roads. If you have an airplane coming into a country and you have checkpoints for people exiting and entering from there, it becomes relatively easy for you to have very stringent measures at those locations,” Khan noted.

To learn more about Viptela’s solutions and how this startup expanded its presence, watch the complete video interview below. And be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE