Some technologists working on software-based networking research projects funded by the National Science Foundation and Energy Department believe that SDN technology could bolster the security of agency infrastructures, GCN reported Monday.

John Moore writes that NSF and DOE collaborated with universities to build SDN tools with the goal of managing complex enterprise networks and system vulnerabilities.

“SDN is exciting because it provides an architectural path forward, cutting through the complexity in networks today and providing more programmability,” said P. Brighten Godfrey, a University of Illinois computer science assistant professor, according to the article.

Godfrey’s team is testing the VeriFlow network security architecture under an NSF-backed program, Moore writes.

GCN reports that DOE’s Energy Sciences Network project aims to demonstrate how SDN technology can help manage a high-speed network that is connected to 30 agency sites and more than 100 research and academic networks.

Inder Monga, ESnet chief technologist and area lead, said the technology is designed to organize and move huge amounts of scientific datasets around a network, according to Moore’s report.