SDX: The Engine Powering Our SD-WAN

We're building the next generation of network management and cybersecurity solutions, centered around our core SDX platform. SDX is our comprehensive architecture designed for intelligent, agile, and secure network orchestration. It provides the foundational technology that powers our security products.

Today we're going to have a look at SDX Lite and its capabilities.

What is SDX Lite?

SDX Lite is a powerful implementation of our broader SDX platform, meticulously engineered for managing MikroTik RouterOS deployments. It embodies the core principles of our SDN philosophy – centralized control, automation, and programmability – tailored specifically for the MikroTik ecosystem. Born from years of development and real-world application, SDX is fundamentally an API-first approach to network management at scale.

This API-centric design provides excellent flexibility, allowing us not only to build more abstracted, user-focused systems on top of it but also to offer a robust toolkit for organizations that need granular control and deep integration capabilities for their existing MikroTik networks.

Who is SDX Lite For?

While our core product aims to democratize cybersecurity for a broad business audience, SDX Lite directly addresses the needs of technically proficient organizations heavily invested in MikroTik hardware, such as:

• Internet Service Providers (ISPs): Managing hundreds or thousands of customer-premises MikroTik devices requires robust, automatable orchestration. SDX Lite provides the tools to provision, configure, and monitor these CPEs efficiently and at scale.
• Network Operations Centers (NOCs): For entities overseeing large, distributed MikroTik networks, SDX Lite offers a centralized management plane, significantly reducing the operational burden of individual device management.
• Organizations with Large MikroTik Deployments: Any business with a significant number of MikroTik routers can benefit from SDX Lite's ability to streamline operations, enforce consistent configurations, and enhance security on their existing hardware.

The key here is ease of integration. SDX Lite's comprehensive capability allows these organizations to extend their own custom management systems, dashboards, and automation workflows, tailoring the platform to their unique operational requirements with their MikroTik infrastructure.

Key Features of SDX Lite:

SDX Lite is packed with features designed to give developers and network engineers the tools they need for their MikroTik deployments:

• Scalable Configuration & Script Deployment:
  Our platform offers a developer-friendly mechanism to push configuration changes and RouterOS scripts to thousands of MikroTik devices simultaneously. This isn't just a "fire-and-forget" system. You can:
  • Test Changes: Deploy scripts or configurations to pilot devices or groups.
  • Verify Execution: Receive confirmation and detailed logs on job completion or failure for each device.
  • Rollback Mechanisms (API-driven): Facilitate reverting changes if issues arise.
  • Comprehensive Audit Logging: All changes, API calls, and job statuses are meticulously logged, providing a clear audit trail.
    This is a far more robust and scalable approach than manually connecting to individual MikroTik devices.
• Threat Feeds:
  Integrate dynamic, BGP-delivered threat intelligence feeds to automatically block traffic to and from known malicious IP addresses at the network edge of your MikroTik devices and even our VPN aggregation points.
• Advanced Content Filtering:
  Leverage DNS-based content filtering policies. Altostrat simplifies this into application-level controls, SDX Lite users can access the underlying capability to filter based on categories and an extensive list of over 2,000 common applications that we track and maintain – the same rich dataset that powers our application intelligence.
• Site-to-Site VPN Orchestration:
  Streamline the creation and management of secure VPN tunnels between your MikroTik locations, forming a cohesive private network.
• Captive Portal Engine:
  Access the foundational components for deploying identity-based network access control on your MikroTik networks, requiring users to authenticate before gaining network privileges. This is the same core technology that Altostrat uses for its user authentication pillar.
• Scheduled Changes & Scripting:
  Automate routine tasks, configuration updates, or compliance checks by scheduling RouterOS scripts to run at specific times or intervals across selected groups of MikroTik devices.
• Robust WAN Failover:
  Configure and manage basic WAN failover for up to four internet connections on your MikroTik devices, ensuring connectivity resilience.

SDX Lite: A MikroTik-Optimized Cornerstone

Our main product focuses on simplifying cybersecurity through the "Users, Devices, Locations, Applications" framework, much of which is made possible by the robust and flexible nature of our SDX platform, with SDX Lite serving as its initial, MikroTik-optimized engine.

Our security offering takes the powerful, granular capabilities inherent in the SDX architecture and presents them through an abstracted, highly intuitive interface tailored for business users.

The Future: SDX Pro on VNF and an Evolving Platform

SDX Lite represents the core feature set of our SDX platform as implemented on third-party MikroTik hardware. Looking ahead, we are also developing SDX Pro. This premier tier of our SDX platform, will run on our own Virtual Network Function (VNF) image. This means SDX Pro will offer the ultimate in flexibility, performance, and control, deployable on generic hardware or virtualized environments, freeing it from the constraints of any specific third-party hardware vendor.

The roadmap for the entire SDX platform (including Lite leveraging MikroTik and Pro on VNF) includes evolving its capabilities into an even more fully-fledged, hardware-agnostic SD-WAN system.

This layered approach ensures we can serve the immediate needs of the MikroTik community with SDX Lite, while paving the way for broader market access and cutting-edge features with SDX Pro and our future VNF solutions.

Get Started with SDX Lite

If you're an ISP, run a NOC, or manage a large fleet of MikroTik devices and are looking for a powerful, proven platform to streamline your operations, enhance security, and build custom solutions on your existing hardware, SDX Lite is for you.

Get in touch with us today to discuss API access and how the SDX Lite platform can transform your MikroTik network management.