Certification and Career Goals for 2020

[Otanx]

Congrats. That is pretty cool.

Dean: Just go 100% work from home, and make your employees supply their own internet. Boom. No network. Also no prem for the network to even be on. I will send you my address for that burrito.


-Otanx

[wintermute000]

You joke but that's the zero-trust push, and it works (we have deployed several zero-trust solutions since COVID and users happily @ home remoting into work resources and its not a traditional client VPN to a DC head-end, even though some solutions do have similar components).
For forward thinking companies where remote bodies make sense for the workflow, it could seriously, seriously reduce the need for real estate. And in-turn the traditional campus and WAN market. We're seeing slowdown even for SD-WAN (though how much of that is general depression, who knows).

Akamai reckon their entire workforce operates off zero-trust (their solution, naturally, which is basically the same as ZScalers), their offices are literally internet hotspots and the workflow is the same whether in the office or at home.

If I was the CIO this would be my future direction. Zero-trust, full BYOD, buy meraki / commodity internet and happy days. Everyone gets Azure AD and everyone 2FAs into everything.

[deanwebb]

^Truth.

Even PCI and HIPAA environments can be created and secured in the cloud. Even if you're working in the office, you can basically do it all in the cloud. The pushes are all to the endpoint or the cloud, very little push to expand switches or things like that in the middle. Manufacturing would be one place that still requires on-prem gear, but that is already a different space than the normal Cisco office.

[wintermute000]

The larger point is that zero-trust doesn't care where your workloads are, if they're in the cloud or on-prem its all gravy. The key is that identity is brokered, and part of the connection mechanism, and available over the internet since everything is assumed to be untrusted until it authenticates and authorises.

[Otanx]

Zero Trust is going to be the way to do most stuff it the future. Intercept of TLS traffic is going away, and with work from home, cloud, etc. nobody has a traditional perimeter to secure anymore. Agents on all end points. Authenticate and encrypt all traffic. Then you don't really care about the transport.

-Otanx