My second day of VMware Explore was just as jam-packed as day one. I started the day by attending the Microsoft Keynote, hosted by Jeff Woolsey.

Jeff discussed how over the past two years, we have gone through unprecedented change and how this has shifted our focus and objectives as an industry. One message that resonated with me and reflected what VMware presented in the general session, is the message around a cloud smart strategy. Jeff discussed how it is unrealistic to believe that we will have all apps and data in the public cloud, but actually the reality is that we will use hybrid & multi-cloud.

The two key technologies discussed in the session were Azure VMware Solution (AVS) and Azure Arc for vSphere.

Azure VMware Solution

Jeff discussed how AVS allows you to run a vSphere environment within Azure. Therefore, you are able to use the familiar VMware infrastructure you know (and love), within the cloud. Throughout the session, Jeff discussed different use cases where AVS can be extremely beneficial.

The first use case was for organisations that want to migrate their workloads to Azure with simplicity and ease. This may be good for people that are starting their cloud journey or that need to move their workloads to the cloud quickly. The most important factor that Jeff stated and emphasised was that with any move to the cloud, it should always be planned correctly. This resonated with the ‘cloud smart’ message from VMware.

The second use case was to be used for Disaster Recovery. With AVS, you are able to replicate your vSphere workloads on-premises to Azure.

Azure Arc

Azure Arc simplifies governance and management by delivering a consistent multi-cloud and on-premises management platform. Arc allows you to configure, manage and secure your environments regardless of where they are located.

Jeff discussed how this technology is able to save organisations time and resource as it is all centrally managed, allowing teams more time to innovate. We also saw a customer case study from Greggs. It was interesting to hear first-hand how this food chain was using Azure Arc to free up their time to be able to innovate and plan for the future.

It was great to learn more about these technologies and ultimately, it was great to see how Microsoft and VMware are coming together to give customers the best experience, regardless of the technology they use.

vSphere 8 updates

Following this session, I attended the overflowing vSphere 8 session to learn more about the new innovations and features that are introduced with vSphere 8. There was lots covered so I have summarised the key announcements:

• vSphere 8 introduces a cloud consumption interface bringing self-service access to IaaS

• vSphere 8 builds a flexible and open ecosystem of DPU solutions

• vSphere 8 supports higher complexity AI & ML workloads

• vSphere 8 allows you to monitor your workload power consumption so that you can make sustainable adjustments where necessary

In the afternoon, I took the time to explore the expo floor. It was good to learn more about what VMware partners are doing to innovate and ultimately help their customers. There was a lot to learn about the new products from partners and some great conversations about the industry. In my opinion, this is a key element that we miss at virtual events and is great to be able to immerse myself in the industry again.

And lastly, as always, it was great to attend the VMware party. This year, the band was Simple Minds, who put on a great show and of course it was great to catch up with more of the community. I am looking forward to the last day today and learning even more!

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @BizTechMeg to keep up with my live snapshots, short vlogs and more throughout the event!

At VMware Explore 2022, taking place in Barcelona, VMware spoke about the need to escape cloud chaos by being cloud smart. VMware suggested that a cloud first approach adopted by many organisations had led to lengthy refactoring programs with extended time to value for many organisations.

From my perspective I have seen similar cloud first approaches turning to chaos led by a uncertainty of where to start, leading to a lack of innovation and paused initiatives. Equally those that have started have failed to do so in a manner that drives business value leading to increased costs or security concerns.

VMware’s cloud smart approach is to offer a unified platform and set of tools that embraces the hybrid cloud, alongside the acceptance of migrating workloads to the public cloud, whilst refactoring where business value can be gained.

Microsoft echo’d this message in their session at VMware Explore whilst talking about their Azure VMware Solution (VMware Cloud Foundation in Azure) and Azure Arc for vSphere (on-premises vSphere management and operations from within Azure). The Microsoft presenter explained to expect every workload to be refactored or indeed even moved to the public cloud was an unrealistic and unhelpful expectation.

Irrespective of the right Cloud smart solution that will work for your organisation in a hybrid / multi cloud approach, now is the time to move away from setting a strategy of cloud first without much substance and moving to a business outcome driven cloud smart approach.

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The general session is always a favourite of mine at VMware Explore because it gives such great insight into what the vision of VMware is, what the focus is for the organisation and of course, there is always some great announcements thrown in for good measure.

Check out the video below to hear my thoughts and what my key take aways were from the session this year.

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @BizTechMeg to keep up with my live snapshots, short vlogs and more throughout the event!

Today was the first day of VMware Explore 2022. The event was kicked off with a general session which is always a great opportunity to learn more about VMware’s vision, key announcements and new technology.

The session was kicked off with VMware’s CEO, Raghu Raghuram. Raghu’s key message of the session was focused on shifting focus from a ‘cloud first’ approach to a ‘cloud smart’ approach. VMware found that many with a cloud first approach actually didn’t achieve what they wanted to as effectively or efficiently as they would like. This ineffective cloud first approach has now led to cloud chaos!

Raghuram believes companies that adopt a cloud smart approach can move from disparate teams to a consistent cloud strategy, providing better experiences and a more secure strategy.

The keynote moved quickly with lots of content and announcements from a number of great speakers. Some of the key messages and announcements were:

• How we need to innovate to reduce energy costs and ultimately help ourselves in the future

• vSAN 8 & vSphere 8 are Generally Available (GA) as of today

• That VMware Cross Cloud services give you consistent experiences across any cloud and we need to accept that it is inevitable that businesses will use multiple clouds, not just one.

• Flexible working is here to stay and 75% of organisations recognise the Digital Employee Experience needs to be a top priority

• That organisations need not only to try and prevent Ransomware attacks but have the right tools in place to recover from an attack. An attack happens every 11 seconds, so you need to be able to recover to a good point as quickly as possible. VMware Ransomware Recovery can help.

• And there were some great customer stories from Mclaren and Llyods Banking about how VMware have allowed them to innovate and improve their experiences

Following the general session, I attended an influencer & press panel session with a number of VMware execs, hosted by Joe Baguley. It was great to hear a little more about the company’s vision and get some real detailed answers about various areas of the organisation, building upon what we heard in the general session.

There were great questions and discussions about the Broadcom acquisition, reducing carbon footprint, security and more and it was great to get these insights from the exec’s first hand.

After some lunch and a catch-up with the community, I joined the EUC solutions keynote hosted by Shankar Iyer. The key message from this session was focused on how work has fundamentally changed, and we need to adapt to ensure that the employee experience is consistent and personalised to enable employees to work effectively.

Shankar discussed how organisations also need to bring together experience and security and make sure they are balanced. Many don’t get this balance right and it can either put too much emphasis on security, negatively impacting the experience, or prioritising experience over security and putting your business at risk.
A big focus of session was about automation and how with automated tools and processes, we are able to do more with less. There were some great customer stories and demonstrations that discussed and showed how these organisations are using automation to improve experiences without impacting security.

Lastly, Shawn Bass was on stage demonstrating and discussing some of the Workspace ONE technologies and the autonomous workspace in action. This was a great insight into how this technology can work and actually see some real benefit it can bring organisations.

Whilst my brain was full of content and I was busy digesting all that I had already heard throughout the day, I took a lap around the solutions exchange to learn more about what is happening in the industry. Tomorrow, I want to spend longer in the solutions exchange to learn more about how these VMware partners are enabling businesses and improving experiences, whether that is related to cloud, employee experiences or security.

I am already excited for another day of exploring tomorrow!

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @BizTechMeg to keep up with my live snapshots, short vlogs and more throughout the event!

In this video I give you a tour through registration and onto the Hands on Labs and Breakout hall. If your at VMware Explore be sure to say hi.

My second session at ChefConf 2022 was ‘Config Management Isn’t Dead’ by Brittney Woods, Manager - Server Automation, H&R Block.

This was a great session based on Brittney’s learned experiences using Chef for config management across multiple roles. Brittney is a fantastic presenter and hopefully, we get to meet her hermit crab and hamster in her next presentation 😄.

This really is a session you must watch to get the most out of the content

https://prgress.co/3cSJtgI

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My main take ways from this session were as follows

1. Configuration Management is about much more than deployment alone. It is about continuously managing you configuration. Only with good config management and compliance can you understand drift over time and ensure your solutions remain in compliance.

2. Configuration management is about much more than just VMs. Configuration management extends to containers and the cloud as well.

3. Using configuration management to manage images for VMs and containers can ensure compliance and expedite delivery.

4. Configuration management can and should be integrated with infrastructure automation platforms like Terraform.

5. Chef can be used to ensure that your resources always comply with CIS benchmarks and DISA-STIGs etc

6. Config Management is a critical component to allow the barrier for entry to be lowered for developers who need to innovate faster whilst ensuring security and compliance

Watch the session for yourself

https://prgress.co/3cSJtgI

Disclaimer: Tech Doodles through Tech Crossing Limited has been paid by Progress to create content covering ChefConf22. Whilst Tech Crossing Limited and the authors of this blog post have been paid to create the content, there has been no influence or editorial control by Progress.

The first session I attended at ChefConf 2022 was the roadmap session with Prashanth Nanjundappa, VP of Product Management Progress Chef.

You can watch the session yourself at the link below.

https://prgress.co/3ARHT6N

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Prashanth was joined by his colleagues to review the progress they have made over the last year and their plans for the year ahead.

Presenting alongside Prashanth was:-

Stephen Blankenship - Principal Product Manager - Infra, Desktop and Application Delivery

Sharan Rayakar - Principal Product Manager - Compliance and Security

Nischal Reddy - Principal Product Manager - Platform and Cloud

Looking Back

Over the last year, it was discussed how there had been a focus on making the products easier to use as well as ensuring they deliver quicker time to value.

To this end the following features have been worked upon or improved over the last year.

1. Flexible deployment models

   1. On-Premises

   2. Chef SaaS

   3. Marketplace Deployments (Azure and AWS)

   4. High-Availability Deployment Models

2. Automation of Infra Views

   1. Allowing users to undertake increased management tasks from the UI rather than just the command interface. This makes the product easier to use and to pick up for inexperienced users whilst advanced users can continue to use the command interface.

3. Data Feed

   1. Send Chef Client Run and Compliance Scan data to 3rd party tools like IT Asset Management and Config management solutions.

      1. Webhook Integrations

         1. ServiceNow

         2. Splunk

         3. ELK

         4. Custom

      2. Storage Integrations

         1. Amazon S3

         2. minio

4. IoT and Edge Management

   1. Using Chef Habitat to manage all applications and dependencies across and IoT estate.

      1. This has been proven to save management time and increase efficiencies.

5. Chef Cloud Security - Chef CSPM

   1. Chef Cloud Security allows users to assess their cloud infrastructures in AWS, Azure and GCP against up-to-date best practise and compliance guidelines.

   2. Container orchestration platforms such as Docker and Kubernetes are also supported.

6. New Audit and Remediation Content for Chef Compliance

   1. A large amount of new audit and remediation content has been added to Chef Compliance, allowing support for new and updated OS’s and Apps.

Looking Forward

As the session turned to look at the roadmap there was a discussion regarding how Progress had engaged with their users and the Chef community to decide upon the roadmap items. The highest voted requests were, Easy upgrades, support for scheduling push jobs, integration with IT operational support systems, support for agentless models and the ability to manage container environments.

Based upon this feedback the forward-looking roadmap is going to focus on the following three areas 1. Ease of Use and Upgrades, 2. Job Orchestration and 3. Hybrid Cloud and SaaS. It was explained how moving forward they are going to take a platform approach building a unified and extendable Enterprise Automation Platform.

Key messages from the roadmap included

• General Availability of Chef SaaS at the beginning of 2023

• Persona-related insights to be added to Compliance and Security, allowing users to identify relevant insights quickly and to remediate as required.

• Chef CPSM will have improved flows with fewer clicks allowing quicker time to value across an increasing number of cloud resources.

• The Chef Client will support rolling updates and centralised management with the ability to support two client versions simultaneously for cookbook compatibility.

• Job Orchestration Service - Will have a push-centric model with granular control allowing jobs to be run on a reoccurring basis with exception supported. It will also support jobs to be run based upon conditions.

• Workstation will have the introduction of a frequent actions UI

  • Based upon user research, it will enable new team members and non “Chef experts” to be productive in Chef faster.

Watch the session: https://prgress.co/3ARHT6N

Conclusion

It was interesting to hear directly from the people managing the products, learning what had been implemented over the last year and the direction of the products moving forward. I was impressed by how the product roadmap had been driven by direct feedback from the users and the community.

It was clear there is a big focus on ease of use and value to the users. I particularly like the sound of the SaaS platform for ease of adoption, the persona-based insights, and the ability to check cloud infrastructure compliance quickly and easily.

You can watch the session yourself at the link below.

https://prgress.co/3ARHT6N

Disclaimer: Tech Doodles through Tech Crossing Limited has been paid by Progress to create content covering ChefConf22. Whilst Tech Crossing Limited and the authors of this blog post have been paid to create the content, there has been no influence or editorial control by Progress.

Trying to ensure your network is secure often seems like an impossible battle. Many security and network operation teams often face a losing battle of an ever-growing list of software, aiming to ease administration and secure the network. The truth is, more often than not, this software ends up creating further information silos and adding to the barrage of information for the already bewildered specialists to try to understand.

I was recently given the opportunity to attend an exec briefing with some of the security team at Juniper Networks to understand how their approach differs.  

As always I have summerised my findings in the Tech Doodle below.  

Before I delve a little deeper into Juniper Security Director Cloud, let me share with you my top 3 thoughts: 

1.  Juniper Security Director Cloud is a subscription-based service avoiding additional hardware requirements 

2. Juniper Security Director Cloud works well with Juniper and third-party solutions 

3. Juniper Security Director Cloud has intelligent policy management and can make reactive changes based upon threat analysis  

Juniper Security Director Cloud is an as-a-Service subscription-based solution meaning there is no need for additional hardware or complex initial configuration. As mentioned above I was particularly impressed with how it offers customers support for a number of third-party technologies as well as the wealth of solutions within Juniper’s portfolio.

Core to Juniper Security Director Cloud is the belief that the network itself should become threat-aware.  

Utilising in-built intelligence, Juniper Security Director Cloud is able to protect every connection from client to workload from on-premises to the cloud.  

Juniper Security Director Cloud utilises a unified policy set irrespective of the device, but importantly the automation capabilities allow for deduplication, rule precedence and error avoidance within the policies. Critically, Juniper Security Director cloud is not only able to help you monitor your estate, but also make reactive changes based upon threat analysis.

Many organisations are looking for solutions that are able to simplify and centralise security operations. Not only should they help reduce the burden of multiple siloed solutions, but should also look to use intelligence and automation to help proactively protect the network. This is exactly what Juniper Security Director Cloud sets out to achieve. For organisations that are looking to implement SASE (Secure Access Secure Edge) principles, the fact that Juniper Security Director Cloud supports third- party solutions will allow for Juniper Secure Edge solutions to be implemented alongside existing solutions whilst transitioning.

Juniper is also ever innovating in this space and recently announced the addition of CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker) and DLP (Data Loss Prevention) into their Secure Edge offering.

It was good to learn more about Juniper’s approach to security and SASE. For me I am really looking forward to seeing this technology in action. A single unified approach to policy and intelligent threat analysis coupled with reactive changes is a very powerful mix. I hope to be able to share some demonstrations of this technology with the Tech Doodles readers soon.

You can learn more about Juniper Connected Security at Black Hat 2022 on booth #2240.

Disclaimer: Tech Doodles through Tech Crossing Limited has been paid by Juniper to create content following the Juniper Networks Analyst, Influencer and Media Global Summit 2021. Whilst Tech Crossing Limited and the authors of this blog post have been paid to create the content, there has been no influence or editorial control by Juniper Networks.

Recently I joined Commvault to discuss the challenges with data protection as organisations embrace the cloud.

You are able to watch the recent webinar where I spoke on this subject alongside Commvault’s Marc Lucas and Ronnie Kaftal here >> Commvault-Spotlight on Digital Transformation.

The doodle below summarises the areas for discussion in the webinar.

Most of us at the moment are seeing fast adoption of cloud based services such as SaaS like Microsoft 365 or IaaS with platforms like Azure, AWS, Google Cloud and more. Whilst these services help organisations accelerate innovation and remove the burden of many administrative functions, there is still the need to manage and protect the data.

In this situation it isn’t uncommon for many point fix solutions to be implemented. This fixes the problem in a specific area but equally leads to a fragmentation of points of management, policy and monitoring.

This is where Commvault comes in unifying data management and protection across on-premises and the cloud, across tradition applications and modern applications.

Metallic is Commvault’s data management as a service platform, it uses the same code base as the on-premises version but delivered a full cloud service and importantly you have a single point of management on-premises and in the cloud with their Control Center management plane.

Operators further get to choose where the data they wish to protect is stored with three different storage plane options.

1. Full SaaS storage plane delivered as part of the service in a local Azure Region or with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

2. Bring your own storage from private cloud, public cloud or on-premises options.

3. Commvault’s HSX appliances .

During the webinar we saw how the Metallic platform allowed data to be managed across all infrastructure and application areas.

• Demo One - Backup of a VM rom Nutanix being recovered to Azure

• Demo Two - An Azure VM being backed-up to Metallic Cloud Storage and recovered to AWS

• Demo Three - A SQL server database on-premises being recovered to a cloud based PaaS solution

• Demo Four - Kubernetes and Database backup via Metallic.

Conclusion

It has been really good to work with Commvault to understand their offerings for hybrid-cloud management. Commvault aren’t a company that has gone and acquired companies to fix gaps in their portfolio, they have built the integrations from scratch and importantly unlike some others this results in a single management plane.

If you would like to learn more about Metallic you can check out the website below

SaaS Backup & Recovery Solutions for Data Protection & Compliance (metallic.io)

Disclaimer: Tech Doodles through Tech Crossing Limited has been paid by Commvault to create content covering the Metallic product set. Whilst Tech Crossing Limited and the authors of this blog post have been paid to create the content, there has been no influence or editorial control by Commvault.

Dell Tech World 2022 was important for two reasons. First, this was the first Dell Tech World since the spin-off of VMware. Second this was one of the first major in person tech conferences since the start of the COVID pandemic.  

I didn’t make it out to Vegas this year but tuned in online, after all we are now in the era of flexibility and freedom. Attend any major conference, from anywhere and on any device or something like that.  

As a long time, VMware vExpert, Dell Partner and Technologist, keeping up to date with what is going on in the world of infrastructure is of high importance to me.  

There were several themes covering Dell Tech World 2022, these being flexible and hybrid working, multi-cloud, cyber protection or resilience and the power of data.  

During Michael Dell’s Monday keynote, he spoke about the on-prem / off-prem debate being over. He said that the future is in multi-cloud with data flowing seamlessly across.   

90% of customers already have workloads on-premises and in public clouds and 75% are using three or more clouds 

Michael Dell – Dell Tech World 2022 Keynote 

Dell wants to be the leader in multi-cloud and at the edge. He spoke about the rise in use cases such as IoT and highly automated environments requiring new edge computing solutions near the source of the data. This is an area Dell will be able to excel in due to their hardware offerings and close relationship with VMware despite the spin-off.  

10% of data today is processed outside of datacentres, but by 2025 75% of enterprise data will be processed at the edge.  

Michael Dell – Dell Tech World 2022 Keynote 

However due to this growth in data, Michael Dell explained that the attack surface will also be bigger for cyberattacks.  

Ransomware attacks are the #1 threat for most organisations and are occurring every 11 seconds. With an average cost of $13m per occurrence.   

Michael Dell – Dell Tech World 2022 Keynote 

Dell have been innovating in these spaces and desire to create an end-to-end integrated path. What really stood out for me at Dell Tech World was many of the big announcements were all about services or software. Dell, a well-known hardware giant is certainly investing a lot in these areas to be relevant in this multi-cloud as-a-service world.  

Central to this is Dell APEX, Dell’s as-a-Service portfolio. Michael Dell spoke about APEX being focused on business outcomes and being accessible to developers. APEX was announced last year at Dell Tech World as a companywide transformation to as-a-Service. Chuck Whitten spoke of the principles of APEX being simplicity, agility and control in the multi-cloud world.   

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Previously announced within the APEX portfolio was APEX Cloud Service with VMware Cloud and APEX Backup Services.  

At Dell Tech World ‘22 we saw the announcement of APEX Cyber Recovery Services with the promise of further APEX services to come including high-performance computing, machine learning operations, VDI and more.  

APEX Cyber Recovery Services is run and managed by Dell, offering a secure immutable cyber recovery vault for workload replication. Customers should be able to be reassured of their ability to recover from a cyberattack whilst benefiting from being able to offload the day-to-day tasks to Dell.  

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But the innovation towards multi-cloud didn’t end there. There were announcements from both the data protection and storage divisions further embracing integration with the public cloud.   

CyberSense for AWS – Uses adaptive analytics, machine learning and forensic tools to detect, diagnose and help with cyber recovery operations. Dell say this will allow you to diagnose and recover quickly within AWS.  

PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for Azure – Available from the Azure marketplace next month, this will allow you to isolate and protect workloads from ransomware attacks. You will get an isolated data centre environment via an isolated recovery vault. Data is replicated from production with minimal access for data protection. When it comes to recovery you can recover on-premises or within Azure.  

Also demonstrated at the conference was Project Alpine. Project Alpine offers Software Defined Storage capabilities to expand Dell’s storage portfolio to the cloud. Demonstrated was the ability to connect storage from a PowerStore device to the public cloud. Google Cloud, Azure and AWS were shown on screen during the demo.  

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The final big announcement was regarding a partnership with Snowflake, a cloud data platform vendor. With this partnership users of Dell’s object storage will be able to move data to Snowflake’s cloud platform for analytics and warehouse capabilities. Secondly, you will be able to leverage snowflakes capabilities on-premises without the need to move the data. 

For me, Dell Tech World is a positive step in the right direction for Dell. They are wanting to maximise their capabilities and reach with their hardware solutions by embracing the public cloud with their software solutions and services capabilities. For me it now all comes down to the execution and how we see these solutions being delivered and utilised by the customers. I look forward to seeing the Project Alpine and the APEX solutions in action.  

Today, the increase in cyber-security attacks and their related risk is top of mind for many IT professionals. As such, full consideration needs to be made regarding the appropriate protections that should be in place to mitigate this risk best.

Flowmon positions its Anomaly Detection System (ADS) module at the core of these efforts, ensuring that threats can be detected and responded to as early and quickly as possible.

When speaking to Flowmon, they highlighted the Security Visibility Triad, a framework used by Gartner and others to help examine the three key areas that should be in place to ensure you have true security visibility. The Security Visibility Triad talks about the importance of 1. SIEM and UEBA, 2. Network Detection and Response, and 3. Endpoint Detection and Response. Flowmon focuses its efforts on the Network Detection and Response area of this triad.

Flowmon ADS is a module for the Flowmon product set that is most commonly utilised for network visibility and troubleshooting. Because of this, the ADS module fully leverages the network architecture of Flowmon to collect its data from the network. Furthermore, it utilises network flows, enhanced with layer 7 application data provided by its probes for a unique view of what is going on within the network. You can read more about Flowmon in my previous blog.

Flowmon ADS does not rely on legacy signature-based approaches to detect the anomalies within the captured flows. Instead, it uses machine learning for wide-ranging detection, including zero-day threats.

Typical anomalies detected and alerted upon by Flowmon include:-

• Attacks

  • Port scanning, Dictionary attacks, DoS/DDoS, Telnet

• Traffic Anomalies

  • DNS, DHCP, ICMP, Multicast

• Internal Security

  • Viruses, Malware, Ransomware, Botnets

• Unwanted Applications

  • P2P Networks, Instant Messaging, Anonymisation Servies

• Device Behaviour

  • Change of device behaviour profile

• Operational Problems

  • Delays, Excessive load, Unresponsive services, Broken updates

Whilst how Flowmon detects the anomalies and the breadth of what it is able to detect is truly impressive, the biggest stand-out area for me was how the product allows this information to be used.

With many security products, such as NDR and SIEM solutions, they can be very good at collecting data, but in reality, they simply overload an already overworked administrator with information they can’t use. This is where Flowmon ADS is different.

Flowmon ADS not only detects the threats from the noise using machine learning but also does true route cause analysis. This allows administrators to quickly understand the type of threat, the source, the affected resources and the recommended actions.

With many sources speaking about the amount of time a threat actor may be within your network prior to detection, it is important that IT teams have the right tools to understand exactly what is happening across their network. For me, this is where Flowmon comes in, giving true visibility to Security Operations (SecOps) teams and others in IT to ensure that any threats are quickly and easily neutralised.

For more information about Flowmon ADS and how it can help with Network Detection and Response please check out their website.

Below you can see my doodle covering the subject

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Disclaimer: Tech Doodles through Tech Crossing Limited has been paid by Progress to create content covering the Flowmon product set. Whilst Tech Crossing Limited and the authors of this blog post have been paid to create the content, there has been no influence or editorial control by Progress.

I have recently been doing some work with Flowmon to further understand Flowmon’s Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD) functionality. Below you can see my doodle covering the technology.

In-brief Flowmon, which is now part of Progress, following the Kemp acquisition, gives network operators visibility and insights into network performance and issues. It does this by enriching flow data with level 7 application data, giving enhanced network insight without the overheads of full packet capture. Critical to this is the Flowmon collector appliance which can receive data as Netflow, IPFIX or any standard flow record like sflow, jflow or netstream.

With this collected data, Flowmon provides;

• Autonomous investigation for route cause of operational issues

• In-built expert knowledge of network error codes with remedial action

• Reduced and simplified toolset, allowing delegation of networking monitoring and troubleshooting

• Reduction of network diagnostic noise, allowing problems to be resolved quickly and easily

I was able to understand some of the use cases in action, this included following the process of an administrator trying to diagnose slow internet performance reported by users. Utilising the Flowmon toolset, the problems were able to be tracked down within a few steps. The root cause, diagnosed through Flowmon was an incorrect client configuration, resulting in increased network traffic. This was due to Windows updates being pulled down directly from the internet rather than from the local WSUS server. Without Flowmon, this may have taken Network Admins and other teams many hours to diagnose and resolve.

I was really impressed by what I saw of Flowmon, without tools like this, troubleshooting user issues is often a difficult task, with admins trying to understand where the problem lies between the applications, the network and the user. Flowmon gives network admins the tools they need, not only to resolve problems quickly but to be proactive in their troubleshooting.

You can find out more about Flowmon here

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Disclaimer: Tech Doodles through Tech Crossing Limited has been paid by Progress to create content covering the Flowmon product set. Whilst Tech Crossing Limited and the authors of this blog post have been paid to create the content, there has been no influence or editorial control by Progress.

This week saw the Juniper Networks 2021 global summit for analysts, influencers and the media. I have covered my thoughts on this event and Juniper’s strategy in my earlier blog post. In this blog post, I am going to cover the three key announcements from the summit. 

1. Juniper Support Intelligence

2. New Wi-Fi 6E Access Points

3. Juniper Mist IoT Assurance

Juniper Support Insights

Juniper Support Insights is a cloud-connected, AI-driven support platform for customers using Junos OS devices such as ACX. EX. MX, PTX, QFX and SRX.

With Juniper Support Insights, there is no need to replace or upgrade your device to get this functionality - it is already included. You can choose to connect your devices directly to the cloud, like the Mist AI connected devices, or alternatively, you can use a lightweight collector appliance. The collector is a hardware appliance that can support up to 20,000 devices with a single collector. I think many organisations will choose to opt for the collector in their secure environments.

Once connected to the cloud, Support Insights will give operations actionable insights into their network to allow them to be proactive in their maintenance. In addition, Support Insights will use the small amount of data collected about your devices to give insights regarding the following:

• Product data

• Contracts

• Machine learning

• Install base

• Service requests

• Knowledge base

• PBN’s

• SIRTS

• RMAs

• EOL/EOS

As Support Insights uses machine learning, the more devices that are connected to the cloud, the more accurate and relevant the insights that will be delivered. 

I like the fact that Support Insights is readily accessible without additional cost, upgrade or replacement of existing Junos products. It will undoubtedly help operations teams get better insights into their install base and hopefully assist them in moving from reactive to proactive support. Whilst Support Insights is a read-only freemium offering, at a cost, Juniper also has products that offer read and write interactions with the network, with solutions like Paragon Insights. 

Juniper Support Insights solution

Juniper Support Insights blog

AI-driven Wi-Fi 6E Access Points

The second announcement covered two new AI-driven Wi-Fi 6E access points. The two new access points leverage the Mist cloud and AI engine for rich insights, enhanced troubleshooting and optimisations. The two access points that were announced are both tri-band and quad radio with BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy Support).

The AP45 access point offers Juniper’s patented virtual Bluetooth LE technology. This will be attractive to organisations that need enhanced location-based services.

Product webpage: Juniper Wireless Access Points and Edge

• Product datasheet: AP45 Datasheet

• Product datasheet: AP34 Datasheet

Juniper Mist IoT Assurance

The final announcement focused on the lifecycle of IoT devices on a wireless network, particularly those that lack the support for 802.1x (WPA3 Enterprise).

With IoT devices increasingly being added to our corporate networks and at scale within many networks, it's essential that this process is quick, easy - and importantly, secure. Unfortunately, many IoT devices aren’t enterprise-ready and will lack the necessary features to secure and isolate traffic, all resulting in security issues or configuration complexity. This is where IoT Assurance comes in.

IoT Assurance is a cloud-based service that leverages a Multiple Pre-Shared Key mechanism (MPSK) to easily onboard devices at scale, offering micro-segmentation of devices as well as traffic engineering and full policy management. IoT Assurance provides a full suite of access control functionality using MPSK or Private Pre-Shared Keys, all without relying on having a client MAC address available in advanced or a configured NAC device.

Once the devices are on board, IoT Assurance takes control of day two operations, including automatic PSK expiration in conjunction with automatic key rotation, making sure that keys are regularly rotated whilst ensuring there is no downtime. Some additional tools are integrated, such as the ability to monitor active device utilisation per PSK, a fully-featured API and the ability in the future to create self-provisioning portals that can be used for BYOD workflows.

IoT Assurance Datasheet

Final Thoughts

These announcements further build upon Juniper’s portfolio of products as well as their vision of experience-first networking. With tools like Support Assurance and IoT Assurance, admins can streamline workflows, take proactive actions, and deliver higher levels of reliability, security, and service to end-users.

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Disclaimer: Tech Doodles through Tech Crossing Limited has been paid by Juniper to create content following the Juniper Networks Analyst, Influencer and Media Global Summit 2021. Whilst Tech Crossing Limited and the authors of this blog post have been paid to create the content, there has been no influence or editorial control by Juniper Networks.

Juniper Networks Analyst, Influencer and Media Global Summit 2021

This week saw Juniper present an update on its vision, strategy and latest innovations at the company’s virtual global summit for analysts, influencers and the media. Leading up to this event, I have been lucky enough to meet a number of Juniper execs to understand first-hand its strategy, vision, and latest product offerings.

Juniper has a laser focus on experience-first networking. This is much more than a marketing spin on its products and this was clear throughout the summit and across the company’s product innovations. Experience-first networking for Juniper is all about simple operations for network admins and a superior end-user experience for IT users. Anyone who knows me will know that I'm a simple soul, and while I love enterprise technology, I firmly believe it doesn't need to be complicated. So this messaging and focus both sit well with me.

How is Juniper delivering experience-first networking?

Often when you hear terms like experience-first networking, you will think it is just about marketing spin on top of the same old products. It is clear with Juniper that it goes much deeper than this. It appears to all start with the 2019 acquisition of Mist Systems and particularly the AI offerings surrounding the Marvis technology. If you haven't seen Marvis in action, head over to Tech Field Day to learn more. During the summit there was a short demonstration of the Marvis technology in action, initially showing troubleshooting of a wired network where the root cause had been diagnosed as a faulty network cable. Secondly and most impressively to me, the technology was able to troubleshoot and pinpoint an end-user's issue with Microsoft Teams. These kinds of quick and straightforward troubleshooting abilities make a real difference to both the end-users and the IT teams, allowing them to focus more time on innovation and moving forward, rather than tackling business as usual issues.

The image below was discussed during the summit. It depicts logged support tickets over time and how they were resolved. The green portion shows the tickets resolved (and logged) without human intervention, and the red portion indicates tickets with human intervention. As you can see, with AI technology built into the systems and more nodes being added to improve intelligence, tickets are being resolved before IT even needs to intervene.

Juniper discussed that, moving forward, networking was about much more than speeds and feeds alone. Of course, speeds and feeds are still important, but now it's about delivering real business value - and for Juniper Networks as a software company, this is all about the experience.

What was announced?

Building on the experience-first networking approach and maintaining its leadership within its products, Juniper Networks announced three new offerings during the summit:

• Juniper Support Insights

  • Allows you to connect any Junos OS device securely to the cloud to offer AI-led insights to help operations proactively support the network.

    Juniper Support Insights solution

• Two new Wi-Fi 6E AI-powered Access Points

  • Leveraging the Mist AI technologies, these Wi-Fi 6E access points offer the latest Wi-Fi standards and are combined with technologies such as BLE, other location-based services and much more.

    Wireless Access Points and Edge | Juniper Networks

• IoT Assurance

  • With more and more IoT devices being added to corporate networks, it can often be a challenge to manage the lifecycles of these devices. Whilst some IoT devices will support 802.1X for onboarding, many more devices do not. IoT Assurance allows operations to manage this full lifecycle across all IoT devices using Private Pre-Shared Key (PPSK) technology.

    Delivering Better User and Network Operator Experiences with New Wi-Fi 6E APs and IoT Assurance Driven by Mist AI | Official Juniper Networks Blogs

I have expanded on these announcements in this blog post, but these products further help operations deliver a better experience to end-users, with better uptime, quick resolution to issues, better performance and in-built security.

Final Thoughts

I have been really impressed to hear and understand Juniper's vision, and importantly, how it plans to achieve it. Juniper has been on a journey to modernise its business, and the focus on software and innovation around AI results is a real differentiator that will matter to customers.

Personally, moving forward, I look forward to learning more about Marvis and seeing it in action for myself.

Here are two of my Doodles from the event. Please click them to see them in more detail.

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Disclaimer: Tech Doodles through Tech Crossing Limited has been paid by Juniper to create content following the Juniper Networks Analyst, Influencer and Media Global Summit 2021. Whilst Tech Crossing Limited and the authors of this blog post have been paid to create the content, there has been no influence or editorial control by Juniper Networks.

Today saw the start of Microsoft Ignite November 2021, this keynote focused on hybrid work with Microsoft 365. Jared Spataro Corporate VP of modern work spoke about the key elements and innovations regarding hybrid working.

Jared spoke about organisations requiring a digital fabric to successfully adopt hybrid ways of working, this is made up of communication, collaboration and creation.

Announced today was Microsoft Loop a new app acting as a collaborative canvas allowing you to bring multiple elements together for interactive collaboration.

Within Loop there are 3 core elements, Workspaces, Pages and Components. This is the evolution of fluid components and the elements can be copied from Loop into Teams, Outlook and more and importantly still remain live and interactive.

Read more about Loop here.

Next was ContextIQ, allowing users to get recommendations regarding content and resources directly in the editor to improve productivity and making it more simple to include the elements that matter where you need them.

Read more about Context IQ here.

Finally, I was pleased to see there will also be improvements to Teams webinars including virtual green room, structured Q&A as well as curated experiences allowing specific people and content to be shown within the webinar when required.

Read more about improvements to Teams Webinars here.

You can see my doodle summarising this session below.

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Today Pure Storage have announced three new offerings during their #PureLaunch event. Above you can see my doodle covering these announcements.

Announced was

• Pure Fusion

  • A SaaS Management layer that pools storage arrays into availability zones and automates complex tasks such as

    • Workload placements

    • Workload mobility

    • Fleet rebalancing

Find our more about Pure Fusion

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Portworx Data Services

• The first database as a service platform for kubernetes

• Allow developers to easily rollout stateful managed services such as DBs without vendor lock-in whilst ensuring all day two operations are taken care of including

  • Monitoring

  • Backups

  • HA

  • Disaster Recovery

  • Migration

  • Auto-scaling

  • Security

Find our more about Portworx Data Services

Pure1

• A cloud based data-management platform

• A single hub that is automated by the AI driven Pure1 virtual assistant

• Allowing you to optimise, streamline, analyse and empower your data services quickly and easily

Find out more about Pure1

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This week I have attended #TFD24 as a delegate, the first sponsor to present was Cisco leading with their IoT Solutions. Cisco demonstrated a wide range of IoT ready solutions including both data centre and rugged products for use in the field. During the presentation there was a full review of the IoT portfolio including switching, routing, embedded devices industrial WiFi and their full stack service Industrial Asset vision.

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There were a couple of areas that were of particular interest to me, the first being a discussion on the LoRaWAN architecture. LoRaWAN is a low-powered wide-area network technology that is well suited to IoT use cases. Whilst LoRaWAN is capable of only low data rates (300 bps - 5.5kbps) it is capable of distances up to 15km in rural circumstances and can offer a battery life for devices of up to 10 years! So if you need to track a herd of cattle in a field, or how full a set of bins are in a rural park an IoT solution utilising LoRaWAN might be the right solution for you.

The second interesting part was the Cisco Industrial Asset Vision solution. This was an end to end, customisationable but standardised and ready to deploy IoT solution, including sensors, gateways as well as a cloud-based dashboard to monitor, report and troubleshoot.

This solution will fit a wide amount of use cases due to the large array of sensors available and will be ideally suited to organisations that want an out of the box IoT solution to their business needs, rather than developing something specific from separate parts.

Here is my third and final doodle from the F5 NGINX Sprint 2.0 event that I have been attending with the Tech Field Day Delegates.

During the sessions the specialists at NGINX ran the journey of modernising enterprise applications incorporating the components with NGINX including, NGNIX, NGINX Plus, NGINX App Protect, NGINX Instance Manage, Contoller and much more

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I’ve enjoyed learning about NGINX and the NGINX portfolio during the Sprint 2.0 event. I hadn’t previously had much experience with NGINX, and now after Sprint 2.0, I understand how enterprise organisations are using NGINX’s open source applications and commercial applications to solve day two operational issues.

I think it is excellent for NGINX and their customers that there will be further investment and focus on open source products and engagement. This is clearly an area that attracts new customers through the developer community but then drives new customers to the commercial products when day 2 problems need to be solved by the operations team.

I was also particularly impressed by the F5 integration in the portfolio with technologies such as App Protect but as well as this there is claear delination between NGINX and F5 Big-IP with Big-IP focusing on traditional applications and NGINX on modern adaptable applications.

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As described in my earlier blog post I have been attending F5 NGINX Sprint this week, this blog post focuses on the second half of the initial day which looked at the announcements, commitments as well as a Q&A with Gus Robertson and Rob Whiteley.

During the first day of the conference, there were three commitments and three (and one bonus!) announcements.

These were as follows

Commitment 1

Increase open source development and encourage community contribution

Commitment 2

Continue to innovate the data plane of modern, cloud-native applications

Commitment 3

Create a clear and consistent open-source vs commercial demarcation

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Announcement 1

NGINX is joining forces with the Kubernetes community

Announcement 2

NGINX will release new open-source projects at every layer of the delivery stack

Announcement 3

NGINX Modern Apps Reference Architecture

Bonus Announcement

NGINX unveiled a new interactive community experience that is now arriving.

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Thoughts Regarding the Announcements and Commitments

The commitments and announcements were firmly focused on the community, whether that is the user community or the wider open source community. Learning about NGINX’s history it is clear that their commitment to open source and the community has been core to their business, now part of F5 they are wanting to renew this commitment and demonstrate how being part of F5 means they are able to dedicate more time, people and money to the community and open source programmes which undoubtedly would have been a concern for some after acquisition.

The Modern Apps Reference Architecture (MARA) is aimed to help people spin up a complete and fully operational microservices architecture quickly and easily. MARA integrates open source solutions from NGINX and partners that are pre-wired and preconfigured meaning it is fully production-ready. This means that DevOps teams can easily access MARA from the GitHub repo and deploy it in production with minimal frustration.

You can access the MARA GitHub Repo here.

Tech Field Day Q&A with Gus Robertson and Rob Whiteley

To finish the day I was lucky enough to be part of the Tech Field Day panel for the Q&A with Gus Robertson and Rob Whiteley. I highly recommend watching this session when available and I will update this post with the link. During this session, there were some great questions from the delegates looking at the technology, community, open-source commitment as well as the commercial model and why people should choose to opt for a paid commercial model at the appropriate time. I was particularly impressed with how NGINX has not only managed to appeal to the operation teams via their commercial offerings that meet day 2 needs around scale, performance and security as well as appealing to developers with the open-source offerings and community engagement.

I was particularly interested in the possibility of AI and ML services being developed in the future leveraging the position of the NGINX technologies in the data plane. They spoke about looking to leverage this position in the future in conjunction with AI and ML to offer, predictive analytics to help scale and grow or prevent issues but also to offer business insights regarding the customer journey based upon the insights they could see.

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You can re-watch the sessions from NGINX Sprint 2.0 and find out more about the NGINX technologies at https://www.nginx.com