Veriflow Systems Inc., a startup harnessing techniques from the industrial engineering world to improve the reliability of enterprise networks, is launching its first software-as-a-service offering to push into the cloud market.

Unveiled today, CloudPredict is aimed at facilitating what Veriflow calls “intent-based network verification.” The service enables companies to validate that their off-premises infrastructure operates as expected even in situations they can’t necessarily anticipate in advance. CloudPredict provides this visibility through something called formal verification.

Formal verification is a technique used in certain engineering fields, as well as some software projects, to uncover potential design flaws. It involves using automated algorithms to model the potential states of a system and identify scenarios where it may run into issues. A company that makes industrial robots, for instance, could simulate different production line operations to determine when its machines might break.

Veriflow co-founders Brighten Godfrey, Ahmed Khurshid and Matthew Caesar launched the startup in 2013 after inventing a way of applying formal verification to enterprise networks as part of an academic project. The first iteration of the company’s product was aimed at on-premises networks. CloudPredict extends the technology to more complex multicloud environments that use resources from several infrastructure-as-a-service platforms.

According to Veriflow, the service can run models to identify configuration weaknesses that may make a network susceptible to outages. The same features also lend themselves to identifying cases when security policies are not enforced consistently across workloads.

Administrators can continuously assess the integrity of their company’s infrastructure as it changes over time. The service enables networking teams to verify that configuration changes won’t break anything before rolling them out to production, as well as revalidate updates once they’re live. CloudPredict provides tools for assessing how smoothly a network operates compared with before a modification.

The service opens up a sizable new market for Veriflow. Research firm Gartner Inc. predicts that enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure and applications will reach $214 billion this year, a 17.5 percent increase over 2018.

Veriflow is backed by more than $11 million in funding from New Enterprise Associates, Menlo Ventures and SineWave Ventures.

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