The networking industry is entering a once-in-a-generation replacement cycle. Three forces are converging at the same time, and each one alone would be disruptive. Together, they are making the products sold by the largest incumbents — fundamentally inadequate for what enterprises now need.
AI is breaking existing security. In April 2026, Anthropic launched Project Glasswing, demonstrating that AI can now find security flaws in software faster and cheaper than human experts. The code running most enterprise networks was written 15–25 years ago in programming languages known to be memory-unsafe, and those products are being exposed at an unprecedented rate.
Glasswing’s early findings make the risk concrete. IAI-assisted review surfaced a cluster of serious flaws spanning remote code execution, certificate-verification bypass enabling MITM, denial-of-service crashes, and authentication bypass. Every one of them requires the attacker to reach an internet-facing IKE port.
This is where Graphiant’s architecture eliminates the exposure category, not just the individual CVEs. Our control plane doesn’t run on an internet-facing edge — it runs on a private control plane reachable only through MNO, MVNO, or private 5G channels, with no internet-facing ports (no UDP 500/4500) published at all.
Encryption standards are changing — and the timeline is compressing. Recent research on the number of qubits needed to break RSA has pulled quantum-readiness estimates forward (see Perplexity’s analysis). Enterprises in regulated sectors should now plan for migration windows in 2028–2029 — not the late 2030s. NIST finalized the post-quantum standards in 2024, and government, defense, healthcare, and financial services are already being told to plan migrations. Most incumbents have roadmaps that measure rollout in months or quarters.
Graphiant has a global network that can transition your enterprise in days, not months — because PQC is already shipping in production.
Data must stay in approved countries. GDPR, the US CLOUD Act, and their counterparts now require organizations to prove their data only travels through approved jurisdictions. Compliance isn’t a document anymore — it has to be enforced by the network itself.
Graphiant was built from scratch to address all three. The incumbents can’t match that without rebuilding their products from the ground up — a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar effort that risks disrupting their existing customers and the revenue those customers generate. That asymmetry is the source of our durable competitive advantage.
About 70%-75% of all security vulnerabilities at companies like Microsoft and Google come from a single category: memory-safety bugs in code written in C and C++. Those are the languages almost every networking product in production today was written in.
Microsoft publicly began moving to Rust in July 2019, when its Security Response Center declared memory-safety bugs in C/C++ an intractable risk. By 2023, Rust had shipped inside the Windows kernel — notably the Win32 GDI region implementation and the DWriteCore text-rendering engine — with additional components landing in the bootloader and across Azure services since.
Google moved earlier in product. Fuchsia was already Rust-heavy by 2018–2019. In April 2021, Google announced Rust support in the Android Open Source Project. Android 12 shipped that year with Rust in Keystore2, the new Bluetooth stack (Gabeldorsche), DNS-over-HTTPS3, and parts of the virtualization framework. By Android 13 in 2022, more new native code was written in Rust than in C/C++. In January 2023, the Chromium team approved Rust for Chrome, and font-parsing, QR-encoding, and PNG-decoding paths were subsequently rewritten.
Those are not speculative bets. They are two of the world’s most security-conscious engineering organizations making the same choice, after looking at the same data. Graphiant made the same choice — but we made it at the start, not as a retrofit.
“At Graphiant, we took a major risk. Instead of adopting FRR and relying on C-based development, we chose to build our software in Rust. That risk is now paying off.”
Most networking products are built with the software equivalent of 1990s construction materials — functional, but with known weaknesses that have produced thousands of security breaches over the decades. Graphiant’s entire platform is written in Rust, which eliminates this category of vulnerability by design. To match this, Cisco and Juniper would need to rewrite millions of lines of 25-year-old code — years of effort, billions in cost, and the operational risk of disrupting the customer base that funds everything else they do.
In a traditional SD-WAN, every device that handles your data also holds session state, encryption keys, and traffic metadata. Compromise any one of those devices and an attacker inherits all of it. Graphiant separates the control plane from the data plane completely: authentication, verification, and key distribution never travel on the same path as customer traffic. We partner with telcos to run the control plane over private channels — MNO, MVNO, private 5G — so the control channel is physically and logically distinct from the data the enterprise is moving. We partner with telcos to run the control plane over private channels—MNO, MVNO, or private 5G—ensuring the control channel is both physically and logically separate from the enterprise data plane.
You can continue using any local broadband or last-mile circuit, but through our telco partnerships, the control plane can be moved off-path over RFC 1918 address space. Our control plane can also connects within the cloud via ExpressRoute or Direct Connect, maintaining a fully private connection end to end.
The core of our network holds zero customer information at any transit point. Data passes through much like cars in a tunnel—the infrastructure has no awareness of who is in the cars, where they came from, or where they are going. If an attacker were to compromise a transit device, there is literally nothing to steal.
This is not a feature that can be toggled on or off—it is foundational to how the system is built. As a result, it eliminates entire classes of attacks that still affect session-based architectures, such as traditional solutions, where each node maintains per-session state—exactly the kind of information a lateral-movement attacker target.
In addition, there is no decryption in the middle mile. Decryption, if required, happens only on devices under the customer’s control—not at any third-party location—and those environments are not exposed to the public internet. The only internet-connected segment is the last-mile on-ramp, which connects directly into our stateless core.
The new post-quantum standards are significantly more complex and computationally expensive than today’s crypto. Most vendors have announced support “in the future.” Graphiant has deployed it in production — and we solved the scaling problem while doing it. Traditional approaches require every device to negotiate individually with every other device, so complexity grows quadratically with the number of endpoints. Graphiant’s BGP based centralized approach keeps complexity linear, which means PQC works at enterprise and carrier scale today, not only in lab demos. When regulation makes migration mandatory, we’re not rolling it out — we’re documenting it.
When an enterprise reaches AWS, Salesforce, or Microsoft 365 today, that traffic usually crosses the public internet — passing through dozens of third-party networks where it can be observed, intercepted, or rerouted. Graphiant establishes direct, private connections to cloud providers, SaaS platforms, and partner ecosystems. Customer traffic never touches the public internet. It’s the difference between a private courier and the general postal system — fundamentally different risk profiles, enforced at the transport layer rather than sold as a policy.
Graphiant enforces geographic and jurisdictional rules inside the network’s routing. Traffic is constrained to approved countries and approved paths, verified continuously. This isn’t a contractual promise or a compliance document — it is an auditable engineering property of the system. When a regulator asks “prove that this data never left the EU,” the answer is a routing log, not a policy manual.
Each of these six choices is architectural. Each one alone would require a ground-up rewrite for incumbents to match. Combine all six and the rebuild becomes what software engineers call a rewrite-in-place — the highest-risk, longest-duration kind of project a large company can undertake, and the one most likely to disrupt the existing customer revenue that funds it. Rewrites that large have a well-known failure pattern: the incumbent either does it slowly and gets leapfrogged, or does it quickly and breaks the installed base.
This is why the replacement cycle is an opportunity, not just a competitive talking point. The forces are exogenous — AI, quantum, regulation — and the incumbents built their products in a world where none of those forces existed at scale. A few will rebuild successfully. Most will retrofit. And retrofits will not be enough.
Graphiant didn’t retrofit. We started here.
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