Building an Agentic Control Plane for Large-Scale Networks – Atsign Triple-T
Network engineers have long dreamed of a control plane spanning an entire domain. Routing protocols already give us distributed, self-healing control, yet configuration remains static, hand-crafted, and brittle. This talk asks what happens when autonomous agents automate configuration. We’ll focus on two questions: what traits a control plane must have to run safely (cryptographic identity for every participant, bounded authority, no open inbound ports, operator-owned keys, crypto agility), and how its components communicate (outbound-initiated, end-to-end encrypted channels where identity, not network location, is the boundary). We’ll close with where human judgment still belongs.
Colin Constable is the CTO and co-founder of Atsign, where he is pioneering secure,
identity-first connectivity for people, devices, AI agents, and systems.
Colin has over 40 years of experience in telecommunications, networking, and enterprise
security. He has held senior technical leadership roles at Deutsche Bank, Juniper Networks,
and Credit Suisse, following his foundational years as a technical officer at British Telecom.
His work focuses on enabling organizations to securely connect distributed infrastructure,
protect IoT and edge environments, and build Zero Trust architectures that eliminate
unnecessary network exposure. As enterprises increasingly adopt agentic AI, Colin is
advancing a future where cryptographic identity and decentralized security form the
foundation for trusted communication between agents, applications, and infrastructure.
