“I had always thought Cisco was a networking company, and to see the way they have changed is unbelievable.

The Meraki acquisition has changed their whole company in terms of product and culture.

If I was to describe Cisco is a few words following this trip it would be:

'Cisco are one of the world’s largest software companies'

The traditional networks that were protected by a firewall and a DMZ are no longer fit for purpose.

If we took a network exam and passed with a 95% result, we would be over the moon. If we are configuring a policy across a complete network and it was 95% secure, is that success?

Unfortunately the more complex networks become with onsite, branch and cloud the chances of user error increases significantly. This has seen the rise of software-defined policy-based networks that eliminate user error. The other key is to use more advanced analytics and share the resources of security companies that are paid to identify network threats. The creation of a policy-based, software-defined network where security is fundamental to the core is the new way of creating networks.

Users are also the weak link, a single email from an unknown source can cause serious issues and as such companies are moving to zero trust models where the default is no one is trusted whether they are within the firewalls or not.

The modern network is very different to the traditional network, it is easier to manage, more secure and more suitable to the modern workloads. Access data, any place, any time in a secure manner.”

Simplify IT are running a series of education events on Software-Defined networking in partnership with Cisco at their Bedfont Lakes HQ.

Check out our latest event: