At the Broadband Nation Expo, Adam Cady, Vice President of Business Development at CDI, showcased CDI’s leadership in providing secure, high-performance out-of-band management solutions that redefine remote network management. CDI’s technology empowers organizations across industries—from federal agencies to large enterprises—to maintain robust network connectivity, even in the most distributed and unmanned locations.
Cady highlighted CDI’s specialized hardware, designed for effortless, remote network repairs without the need for on-site visits. Key innovations include CDI’s management appliances, which provide seamless layer-two and layer-three access to network devices via cellular radio for independent troubleshooting. This flexibility allows enterprises to quickly address network issues without deploying on-site personnel, reducing operational costs and minimizing downtime.
CDI’s Windows-based management software further enhances security and control, featuring role-based access for multi-vendor environments and detailed activity logging for comprehensive audit trails. This software is optimized for distributed and rural networks, enabling effective management across vast or remote territories.
With industry-leading federal validation and compliance with high-security standards, CDI delivers adaptable solutions trusted by financial services, oil and gas, and other sectors demanding reliable, scalable network resilience. CDI continues to support secure, efficient network management for the most demanding digital infrastructures.
Adam Cady:
My name is Adam Cady, and I run sales and marketing. I’m VP of business development for CDI. Communication devices is a little bit of mouthful, so better known as CDI. And we’re a supplier of out-of-band management equipment, which probably the layman doesn’t mean much, but what it’s used for is network management. So the devices, we’ve got a few back here we can take a look at in a moment. But the devices extensively are used to allow companies to manage large distributed networks without having to go on site if there’s an outage or a problem or an issue. So our core clients are service providers, US federal government. Our secret sauce is we have a very specific federal validation that’s needed for the US federal government, but as security becomes more important to industry as well, it’s sort of trickling down through industry. So we do a lot of work in financials, oil and gas, insurance, large manufacturers, pharmaceuticals are also our customers.
I’d like to talk a little bit about just a couple of things that we sell. So we could start here. We have a variety of different appliances that were used for network management. So these devices are typically used to manage network appliances. So if there’s an issue with a network and the network goes down, you can’t use a broken network to fix broken network equipment. So the out-of-band management is using bandwidth outside of the network management plane. So this is typically for people who are technical. This is layer two and layer three access, two routers and switches and firewalls. These little pigtail antennas that are sitting on top of the devices are used. These devices will all have a cellular wireless radio inside of them. It’ll be a different management plane to allow access into a broken network to make repairs and fixes.
So the difference in the devices as they sit, they all kind of look similar is the number of serial console ports that are on each one. And again, we’re using a serial console port to make a connection to the devices for management. One other thing to note on these is we do have devices that have power control built in. So if someone is in an operation center and they’re trying to make a fix on an appliance, there’s an issue, they have the ability to turn the appliance on and off. So this could be stuff that’s distributed in data centers, it could be at remote locations, typically at a location where there is not technical personnel on site, and it allows them to have the ability to make a fix or repair without having to send someone on site. So essentially it’s a time saver. What we say is it’s used to avoid a truck roll essentially.
And if we just walk over here real quickly, we can take a look at our management software. So this is a Windows-based software. It’s the first of its kind. It’s been around for 20 years and it’s used to organize the management of the devices. It can run on a VM or a VM slice, and it allows for a couple things that are important besides the organization of out-of-band management. It offers role-based access control. So if you’re co-managing your network with other vendors, you can assign different layers of access to different individuals for security purposes. And then it creates a full forensic trail. So there’s a logging of all activities. So for auditing purposes, you’ve got a secure repository of all activities essentially. The more distributed, and specifically you mentioned the more rural an architecture is, the more this fits into that sort of management platform.
If you’re in a densely populated city area, it’s pretty easy to move someone from one site to another to make a repair. But if you’re in a large distributed architecture, so if you’re in a large state, California or Texas, or you have locations at different spots throughout the city, it might be a cell tower, it might be a data center. Typically, those will be unmanned sites. So if you don’t have this type of a solution, you’re typically running people out to locations. And it can be pretty tedious. It’s more often it’s more time-consuming. And then people are worried about downtime as they’re trying to manage different sites.
