Tag Archives: SASE

Cross Training for Career Completeness

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Are you good at your job? Have you spent thousands of hours training to be the best at a particular discipline? Can you configure things with your eyes closed and are finally on top of the world? What happens next? Where do you go if things change?

It sounds like an age-old career question. You’ve mastered a role. You’ve learned all there is to learn. What more can you do? It’s not something specific to technology either. One of my favorite stories about this struggle comes from the iconic martial artist Bruce Lee. He spent his formative years becoming an expert at Wing Chun and no one would argue he wasn’t one of the best. As the story goes, in 1967 he engaged in a sparring match with a practitioner of a different art and, although he won, he was exhausted and thought things had gone on far too long. This is what encouraged him to develop Jeet Kun Do as a way to incorporate new styles together for more efficiency and eventually led to the development of mixed martial arts (MMA).

What does Bruce Lee have to do with tech? The value of cross training with different tech disciplines is critical for your ability to continue to exist as a technology practitioner.

Time Marches On

A great example of this came up during Mobility Field Day back in May. During the Fortinet presentation there was a discussion about wireless and SASE. I’m sure a couple of the delegates were shrugging their shoulders in puzzlement about this inclusion. After all, what does SASE have to do with SNR or Wi-Fi 6E? Why should they care about software running on an AP when the real action is in the spectrum?

To me, as someone who sees the bigger picture, the value of talking about SASE is crucial. Access points are no longer radio bridges. They are edge computing devices that run a variety of software programs. In the old days it took everything the CPU had to process the connection requests and forward the frames to the right location. Today there is a whole suite of security being done at the edge to keep users safe and reduce the amount of traffic being forwarded into the network.

Does that mean that every wireless engineer needs to become a security expert? No. Far from it. There is specialized knowledge in both areas that people will spend years perfecting. Does that mean that wireless people need to ignore the bigger security picture? That’s also a negative. APs are going to be running more and more software in the modern IT world because it makes sense to put it there and not in the middle of the enterprise or the cloud. Why process traffic if you don’t have to?

It also means that people need to look outside of their specific skillset to understand the value of cross training. There are some areas that have easy crossover potential. Networking and wireless have a lot of commonality. So do storage and cloud, as well as virtualization and storage and cloud. We constantly talk about the importance of including security in the discussion everywhere, from implementation to development. Yet when we talk about the need to understand these technologies at a basic level we often face resistance from operations teams that just want to focus on their area and not the bigger picture.

New Approaches

Jeet Kune Do is a great example of why cross training has valuable lessons for us to learn about disruption. In a traditional martial arts fight, you attack your opponent. The philosophy of Jeet Kun Do is to attack your opponent’s attacks. You spend time defending by keeping them from attacking you. That’s a pretty different approach.

Likewise, in IT we need to examine how to we secure users and operate networks. Fortinet believes security needs to happen at the edge. Their philosophy is informed by their expertise in developing edge hardware to do this role. Other companies would say this is best performed in the cloud using their software, which is often their strength. Which approach is better? There is no right answer. I will say that I am personally a proponent of doing the security stuff as close the edge as possible to reduce the need for more complexity in the core. It might be a remnant of my old “three tier” network training but I feel the edge is the best place to do the hard work, especially given the power of the modern edge compute node CPU.

That doesn’t mean it’s always going to be the best way to do things. That’s why you have to continuously learn and train on new ways of doing things. SASE itself came from SD-WAN which came from SDN. Ten years ago most of this was theoretical or in the very early deployment stage. Today we have practical applications and real-world examples. Where will it go in five years? You only know if you learn how it works now.

Tom’s Take

I’ve always been a voracious learner and training myself on different aspects of technology has given me the visibility to understand the importance of how it all works together. Like Bruce Lee I always look for what’s important and incorporate it into my knowledge base and discard the rest. I know that learning about multiple kinds of technology is the key to having a long career in the industry. You just have to want to see the bigger picture for cross training to be effective.

Disclaimer: This post mentions Fortinet, a presenter at Mobility Field Day 9. The opinions expressed in this post reflect my own perspective and were not influenced by consideration from any companies mentioned.

Aruba Isn’t A Wireless Company (Any More)

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Remember when Aruba was a wireless company? I know it sounds like something that happened 40 years ago but the idea that Aruba only really made wireless access points and some campus switches to support them isn’t as old as you think. The company, now known as HPE Aruba Networking (née Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company), makes more than just Wi-Fi gear. Yet the perception of the industry is that they’re still a wireless company looking to compete with the largest parts of the market.

Branching Out of Office

This year’s Aruba Atmopshere showed me that Aruba is trying to do more than just campus wireless. The industry has shifted away from just providing edge connectivity and is now focused on a holistic lineup of products that are user-focused. You don’t need to go much further than the technical keynote on the second day of the conference to see that. Or the Networking Field Day Experience videos linked above.

Do you know what Aruba wanted to showcase?

  • Campus Switches
  • Data Center Switches
  • Private 5G/LTE
  • SASE/SSE
  • IoT
  • Cloud-Enabled Management

You know what wasn’t on that list? Access points. For a “wireless” company that’s a pretty glaring omission, right? I think it’s actually a brilliant way to help people understand that HPE Aruba Networking is a growing part of the wider HPE business dedicated to connectivity.

It’s been discussed over the years that the HPE acquisition of Aruba was a “reverse acquisition”. That basically means that HPE gave Aruba control over their campus (and later data center) networking portfolio and let them run with it. It was successful and really helped highlight the needs that HPE had in that space. No one was talking about the dominance of Procurve switches. HPE was even reselling Arista gear at the time for the high end customers. Aruba not only was able to right the ship but help it grow over time and adopt home-grown offerings.

When you think of companies like Juniper and Cisco, do you see them as single product vendors? Juniper makes more than just service provider routers. Cisco makes more than just switches. They have distinct lines of business that provide offerings across the spectrum. They both sell firewalls and access points. They both have software divisions. Cisco sells servers and unified communications gear on top of everything else they do. There’s more to both of them than meets the eye.

Aruba needed to shed the wireless moniker in order to grow into a more competitive market segment. When you’re known as a single product vendor you tend to be left out of conversations. Would you call Palo Alto for switches or wireless? No, because they’re a firewall or SASE company. Yes, they make more than those products but they have a niche, as opposed to more diverse companies. I’m not saying Palo Alto isn’t diverse, just that they define their market segment pretty effectively. So much so that people don’t even call application firewalls by that name any longer. They’re “Palo Altos”, giving the company the same generic trademark distinction as Kleenex and Velcro.

User Face-to-Face

Aruba needs to develop the product lines that help get users connected. Wireless is an easy layup for them now so where do they expand? Switches are a logical extension so the CX lines were developed and continue to do well. The expansion into private LTE and security also help significantly, which are bolstered by their recent acquisitions.

Security is an easy one to figure out. Aruba has gone from SD-Branch, focused on people working in remote offices, to add on true SD-WAN functionality with the Silver Peak purchase, to now offering SSE with Axis Security being folded in to the mix. SSE is a growing market segment because the services offered are what users consume. SASE works great if you’re working from home all the time. In the middle of the pandemic that was a given. People had home offices and did their work there.

But now that restrictions are relaxed and people aren’t going into the office all the time. This hybrid work model means no hardware to do the inspection. Since SSE is not focused on hardware it’s a great fit for a mobile hybrid workforce. If you remember how much Aruba was touting the BYOD wireless-only office trend back in 2016 and 2017 you can see how SSE would have been a wonderful fit back then if it had existed. Given how the concept of a wireless-only BYOD office was realized through not having an office I’d say SSE is a perfect fit for the modern state of the enterprise.

Private 5G is a bit more complicated. Why would Aruba embrace a technology that effectively competes with its core business? I’d say that’s because they need to understand the impact that private cellular will have on their business. People aren’t dumping Wi-Fi and moving en masse to CBRS. We’ve reached a point where we’re considering what the requirements for private LTE deployments need to look like and where the real value lies for them. If you have a challenging RF environment and have devices capable of taking SIM cards it makes a lot of sense. Aruba having a native way of providing that kind of connectivity for users that are looking to offer it is also a huge win. It’s also important to note that Aruba wants to make sure it has complete control over the process, so what better way than acquiring a mature company that can integrate into their product lines?

Tom’s Take

I can’t take full credit for this idea. Avril Salter pointed it out during a briefing and I thought it was a wonderful point. Aruba isn’t a wireless company now because they’ve grown to become a true networking company. They offer more than just APs and devices that power them. There have a full line of products that address the needs of a modern user. The name change isn’t just a branding exercise. It represents a shift in the way people need to see the company. Growing beyond what you used to be isn’t a bad thing. It’s a sign of maturity.