It’s very likely that as a kid you would have dressed up as something scary for Halloween and walked around your neighborhood filling buckets with sweets. I couldn’t wait for Halloween. Even as I got older, I would look after my younger cousins (stealing some of their sweets in the process), or meet up with friends to watch scary movies, or attend fancy-dress parties! I bet most of you even do that today.

If you are unfamiliar with single vendor SASE, here is what it is. Per Gartner, SASE is a converged network and security service which is delivered as a service. It “enables zero trust access based on the identity of the user, device or entity, combined with real-time context (such as device security posture) to enforce and govern security and compliance policies. Single-vendor SASE offerings should have a common management plane and data lake across all capabilities”. Whew. That is a lot.

I spent the first 25+ years of my career running global architecture teams for large multinational companies. I collaborated with and learned from my peers at some of the largest Fortune 2,000 companies in the world. We designed and implemented an architecture that enabled our businesses to transform. Security was but over the years it has become more critical as the infrastructure and data have evolved.

Another reason not to like your VPN. In networking we often discuss routing, packets, protocols and latency. It’s always been our lifeblood and our passion. Another area we are passionate about is hardware. A new router, firewall, switch or network appliance will elicit numerous debates and send us to a world of what if? What if I deployed this box to my network? How would it impact it? Would it make the network faster? Would it make my job easier?

Make budgeting easier when it’s time to modernize your access infrastructure. The air has a crispness to it, kids are back in school and the afternoon shadows are growing longer. For me, Fall has always been the season when the last revisions for projects and business as usual (BAU) budget requests were finalized. It was one of the last opportunities to dial in the plan of work for the upcoming year as well as align the projects with the critical financing which makes it all possible.