In network operations, it’s never the same day twice. Most network engineers love this aspect, but it has a dark side. The best plans often fall to the wayside—in an instant work stops and firefighting begins. In the last year, I’ve been part of a whole-day colo move, diagnosed an outage in the middle of the night, and resolved a slow performance issue. I know what the networking operations experience is like, and I know how much better it can be.
The hybrid workforce is here to stay. With that in mind, you should start putting more robust cybersecurity controls in place to mitigate risk. Virtual private networks (VPNs) help secure data, but they are also challenging to bring into your log monitoring and management strategy. VPN and firewall log management gives real-time visibility into security risks. Many VPN and firewall log monitoring problems are similar to log management in general.
Network security is a top-of-mind concern for business executives and technical leaders alike. The costs of a major breach can range in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and it can take years for companies’ reputations to recover. But when most people think about network security, network modeling, visualization, and path analysis probably don’t spring to mind. We believe it should.
Speak with networking ops and engineering leads anywhere, and you’ll hear what I frequently hear: “The way my team actually spends their time is the opposite of how they feel they could best spend it.” The passion they have for their team and the network they keep running is clearly at odds with a frustrating feeling that they can’t get ahead.
Many people are familiar with VPNs in the context of trying to stream TV shows for free. A VPN can make it seem like you’re in a different country by displaying an IP address in Europe or the US, for instance. Appearing to be in New York while traveling in the Netherlands gives you access to sites like Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Max — but the advantages of VPN security go beyond streaming the latest TV shows.
A simple command-line interface (CLI) ping will give you details about your target IP address. However, you may have to input the ipconfig command, and then the arp-a command to fully discover the status of an IP, and this is just for one IP address. Now imagine doing this for an IP block of 300 IPs, or even 50 IPs, or doing the same task periodically to manage your IP pool of thousands of addresses and their metrics. Seems like an Herculean task for any network admin!
After dealing with the COVID global pandemic for the past year, it should be no surprise to anyone that working from home can be challenging. These various challenges include distractions, demands, lack of equipment (home wireless was never meant to be loaded the way it is now), and of course: bandwidth challenges.
