Key Takeaways from Networking Field Day 37: AI, Cybersecurity, and the Future of Networks – Tech Field Day Takeaways

I'm Tom Hollingsworth, networking Practice Lead at Tech Field Day. And here are my takeaways from Networking Field Day 37. This event was an interesting look at how networking is evolving Over the years, we had a very interesting mix of technologies, whether we were talking about quantum communications or data sovereignty including AI and even community outreach.

And we had a wonderful group of people that were willing to kind of talk about the challenges that they're facing in an industry that is so rapidly evolving, whether we're still trying to learn about new technologies or how the implications of the technologies that we are putting into practice conflict with policies and things like that. I wanna start off by giving you a little bit of an overview of our first presentation from, uh, bt. Of course, they are a long time company that has been involved in the telecommunication space, but their presentation was actually about quantum computing and that's something that we've talked about at Tech Field Day quite a long time because the impact of what quantum computing can mean for things like security in the near future is it can't be understated because the invalidation of modern cryptographic algorithms is a boogeyman that we need to be aware of.

But there's so much more to quantum computers than just cracking RSA. In fact, there are opportunities to create effectively untraceable, unbreakable communication strings. And that's one of the things that Andrew Lord at BT really talked about was this idea of quantum networking communications.

Uh, think about a system where you could transmit data from one endpoint to another over a secure communications channel and ensure that it wasn't intercepted because if the data arrives at the other side, you know that nobody interfered with it in the middle. Think about the ultra secure communications that you would love to encrypt with these protocols. And that's what Andrew talked about.

And of course the, the best part was that this technology is still so far out on the horizon that the delegates were trying to keep up with the presentation. And I know that that's something that they're gonna wanna watch again because there's just so much to digest there. It's a new way of thinking about networking and we were very excited to be able to hear that conversation.

After that. We got a special presentation from some of the community members in the networking field day space. Jason Ginter and Scott Roon are two of our delegates who have been doing more than just working and coming to field day events.

They have built their own communities. Jason gave us a presentation over the US Networking User Association, which is something that he put together to form local user groups of networking users, which honestly is a space that has been underutilized for quite a while. He gave us an overview of how a US NUA meeting is put together and the types of content that you'll see and how they are very strict about the content versus the sponsorship opportunities.

And I recently wrote an article about this for our website at Textron it, so make sure that you go check that out with a link in the show notes. Scotton is part of the network automation form. You may know them from the event that they put on Auto Con.

And Scott was talking about the challenges in putting together not only this large community but the event as well. And it goes to show you how a group of motivated people who have a focus on something very important in the industry can have such an impact on so many people. I remember when the Network Automation Forum first started talking about Auto Con and I'm like, that's great.

I would love to see this event succeed. And now they're talking about doing it in Europe and the US and they are almost always sold out of tickets. So if you're interested in Auto Con and the Network Automation Forum, after listening to Scott Rob's presentation, make sure that you sign up to get notified because they're gonna run outta tickets really fast.

Our next presentation was from our friends at Versa and they talked about their newest product, which they call Sovereign Sassy. Now for those of you who don't know, SSE is an outgrowth of sd-wan. It's Secure Access Services Edge and it is a way to provide secure communications between sites but also provide a software layer above that that prevents kind of security issues from arising things like secure web gateways or cloud services, cloud access services brokers.

And the key here with vers implementation of SASE is they're considering the aspects of data sovereignty. We live in a world where data is being stored in the cloud and that data can be moved around at a regular basis depending on whoever is in charge. But there are policies in place in nation states or for organizations that are under strict regulatory concerns that says that data must be tracked at all times and it can never be stored in certain locations or it shouldn't be stored in in others.

And this has an impact on the way that organizations have to keep track of things for auditing purposes. So with vers implementation, they are allowing you to build a sovereign sassy setup that can ensure that your data stays where it's supposed to at all times. And one of the big takeaways for me was the fact that they are providing these kinds of capabilities for organizations that are strictly on premises.

A lot of companies will say, oh, well we don't need to worry about that because that's in the the cloud. But there are some organizations that are never gonna be able to make that cloud leap because there are regulatory agencies that oversee them, say that the data must be stored on site at all times no matter what. And that feels like there's a part of the market that's being underserved.

And I think that's one of the reasons why versus addressing this because with their experience in SD WAN and SS E and the security aspect of the market, they see that need and they know that they can meet it by offering something that is wholly unique to companies that have those requirements. Our final presentation came from selector ai and honestly, we got a big rockstar in the room when John Cap Bianco, I'm sure that you've seen him on a number of presentations over the years, talking about how creating networks that are automated and code first really offer advantages to operations teams. And this was no exception.

When John came in in his bright Hawaiian shirt, we knew that we were ready for a high energy presentation and John absolutely delivered. He talked about the importance of having network copilots to allow you to do more things with your infrastructure. We talked about, uh, using something as simple as Slack to do chat ops, but at a very high level, he talked about the, the concept of twinning your network where you can create an entire digital representation of what you're working on and then do things to it to see how it will react before you implement those changes.

In reality, if this is something that I had had back when I did this for a living, I would probably have a lot less gray hair right now because every time you type in that command on a command line and you hit that button to execute that command, you're never quite sure what's gonna happen. But with the concept of using AI to bring all of those things together, you can be sure that what it says it's gonna do in practice is what you're going to see in production. My final thoughts for networking field a 37 were that you can never be sure what direction networking is going to take in the future.

When we look around at all of the technologies that we have been putting together over the years, there's one thing that I know for sure and I'd like to quote Bob Metcalf, the original founder of ethernet. I don't know what the future of networking is gonna look like, but we're gonna call it ethernet. Well, I don't know what the future of networking is gonna look like, but we're gonna call it networking because at the end of the day, it's about transporting data from one location to another and whether we're doing it over encrypt, encrypted quantum channels, whether we're, uh, serving the regulatory means of an industry by keeping that data in place or moving it through secured, uh, clouds, or we're using AI and digital twins to build more robust resilient networks with better information output.

The truth is that we're all gonna have to stay up to date on all of the technology that's coming out, and there's no better place to do that than at Networking Field day. I'd like to say a special shout out to our, uh, new presenter, BT this is the first time that they've had a chance to present at Networking Field Day, and I think they knocked it out of the park with their great presentation on Quantum from Andrew. Lord, I also wanna say a special shout out to two of our newest delegates, Kevin Nons and Brad Gregory.

Uh, they both brought an interesting perspective to the event, both during the presentations and afterwards. com. You can get a list of all of their socials and you can follow them on any platform.

They have some amazing insights as well as our other delegates who asked lots of great questions around the table who offered their unique perspectives as practitioners in the industry. We honestly couldn't do Tech Field Day without those people. I wanna thank you very much for watching this episode of Tech Field Day takeaways on our Tech Field Day plus YouTube channel.

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