71. Network Engineers are Facing an Identity Crisis – Tech Field Day Podcast Spolight
Converged networking is creating complexity with network operations and engineering teams. Ensuring that users are able to access resources and complete workflows means being up-to-date with the latest technology behind the scenes. You need a trusted partner to make it all happen with minimal issues.
In this episode of the Tech Field Day Podcast, brought to you by HPE Aruba Networking, Tom Hollingsworth is joined by Chris Grundemann, Jeff Olson, and Adam Fuoss as they discuss the growing challenges with networking and how HPE Aruba Networking is addressing them. They talk about SASE and SSE and how tools such as Cloud-Native NAC and SASE AI Copilot work together to address the needs of the modern network. These features, debuted at Black Hat 2025, help teams by making sense of the network and keeping it secure from intruders.
They discuss how AI is going to accelerate operations teams while providing context and understanding for challenges. They also talk about how cloud native principles an apply to both online and on-prem configurations. The panel wraps up with a discussion of the importance of a sole-source provider for these solutions and how HPE Aruba Networking is addressing the integration of recent acquisitions.
Transcript
The world of networking and security continue to converge and convergence invites complexity. And when engineering and operations teams are faced with complexity, they may not know where to turn. In this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast, brought to you by H Puba Networking, we look at the fact that E makes convergence simple.
Welcome to the Tech Field Day podcast, where we bring together a group of technical experts in the IT enterprise space to talk about a single concept about things in enterprise it. This podcast features a variety of perspectives from members of the Tech Field Day delegate community, as well as many of our presenters. And we often recorded an association with one of our Tech Field day events.
Tech Field Day is a part of the futurum group, and this podcast is also published on a number of our sister sites, including Techstrong tv. In this episode, which is brought to you by HP Aruba Networking, we are going to be talking all about SS E and convergence. But before we get into that, I would like to take a moment for our guests to introduce themselves so you know who you're listening to, starting with Chris.
Hi, I'm Chris Grundman. I'm an executive advisor on network infrastructure topics. I'm excited to dig in today.
Hi everyone. Welcome. My name is Jeff Olson, and I lead our SS e and security marketing here at HPE Aruba Networking.
Hello, uh, Adam Fuss, uh, VP of Product Management for Edge Connect SD WAN here at HPE Networking. Really excited to be talking to you guys today. Well, thank you all for joining us.
Let's jump into the premise for today's episode. No doubt you have been faced with challenges when it comes to converging your network. There have been many disparate parts over the years that work really well on their own.
And as soon as you try to mix them together, it's like oil and water or cats and dogs, or like having teenagers. What you need is a solution, some kind of an emulsifier to get them to all behave properly. And I think that that solution involves sassy in this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast.
Sassy makes convergence simple. Now, I'm sure that a lot of people out there are already thinking about one of, one or more of the reasons why convergence is so hard for them, but I was hoping Jeff, Adam, maybe you could tell us a little bit about some of the challenges that you're seeing in the industry around things like convergence. Why is it so hard to get what I would think of as ostensibly similar protocols and standards to all work together properly?
Yeah, so I think I'll start off with this one. So I, I think it starts with a few different things. Uh, the first is that, you know, today, you know, we're effectively delivering different products and tools to customers.
And, you know, they may get those from a single vendor, they may get those from multiple different vendors, but today there's so much work being placed on the end user to actually go out and configure and try to stitch these things together. And I think that if we look at SSE, this is one of these, these kind of, you know, entry points where we're really seeing security and networking starting to merge into a single thing. And the huge benefit in that is that the products are built together by the vendors themselves.
The policy is unified and the ultimate kind of end user experience is much more simple. And there's this constant kind of concept that we hear, especially in the security industry around like tool sprawl. And I think that this is one of these really kind of great areas to start, um, that you actually have the policy engine and you know, the actual network itself and the security stack completely intertwined.
And so that's effectively where I think SASS E is at today. Uh, I, however, I do think it can go a whole lot further as well. I Realized something we, we've thrown out an acronym that people may not understand.
Uh, but more importantly, I think that people may not understand that SASS e is kind of a super set of an existing technology. Adam, seeing the area that you're in in HPE, maybe you could tell kind of our audience, what is the difference between SASS E and FD wan? That's a great question, and it's actually funny you bring that up.
I always tell, um, you know, customers and partners when I speak with them, the mathematical equation of how they get SS E. And so, uh, ss e effectively is SD WAN plus SSE equals ss e. Uh, and so it is the combination really of, of those two technologies.
Now, if you look at, um, you know, HPE networking, we think that broader the definitions of broader in our actual actual equation, we also include NAC in there as well. We think that's an important core component. Um, but ultimately, you know, SS e stands for Secure Access Service Edge, and it's the merging of these technologies really into one thing.
I, I think that's as excellent an answer as, as any, in fact, I've been telling people for years that, uh, SSE is sassy without the hardware, and they're like, well, what's that? And so we have to have this longer conversation. Uh, but I wanted to get a practitioner perspective or perspective on this from, uh, my friend Chris.
Um, Chris, you've been advising people for quite a while about some of their networking strategies. Have you seen challenges around implementing SS e or implementing things that maybe SASS e could make it easier? Uh, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, in, in SS e itself, uh, a as Adam said, it's, it's, uh, a mathematical equation, right? It's, it's a number of different features or services or products depending on how you look at it and how you slice it that are being bundled together. And we've been talking about SASS e for several years now.
Um, but most vendors, SASS e is actually just three or four products with a label strapped on the top. And so actually, you know, converging those into a single offering that actually is kind of an end-to-end service where security and networking are provided through the same interface on the same devices. Um, I, I is, you know, finally starting to happen here.
So that's, that's, that's really exciting. And then the other piece is, you know, SD WAN is obviously a WAN technology, and so there's another piece where things can fall out of convergence, which is, you know, does my campus network actually understand what's going on in SD WAN and, and back and forth, right? So is that home office or, or smaller office or whatever's at the other end of that SD-WAN connection, you know, is that actually a part of my overall enterprise IT network or not?
And in a lot of cases, you know, with the early versions of sd-wan, um, that wasn't really the case. It was, it was two totally separate networks and you really had to do some things to string it together. And so, you know, there's two layers of convergence here, I think happening, or two dimensions of convergence, which is, you know, connecting the WAN and those edge sites into the corporate network, um, at the campus in a real way, and potentially also to your data centers and to your cloud.
And then also bringing those security features actually into the same product in a, in a real way, versus just kind of stacking a bunch of of different services on top of each other. And, and I think that people need to understand the value of having a unified architecture from the top to the bottom, because if I remember correctly, the reason why SSE even exists, because a lot of SD WAN providers started going to other companies to offer, you know, these kinds of things on top of the existing, uh, WAN stack, I can remember. It's like, oh, yeah, well, we'll offer things like, uh, content filtering and proxy stuff, but that, that's somebody else.
Like, we'll, we'll have a portal in our, our platform that allows you to do that. And as we've moved along, we've realized the value of having a, a single vendor providing all of those things because it provides better integration. Um, I, I, you know, Jeff, is this the, the kind of the strategy behind what HP Aruba networking has been trying to bring to the table is, is having something that is, you know, HP top to bottom as opposed to, well, it's a little bit of HPE, but it's also a little bit of this CASB and a little bit of this secure web gateway and possibly some other things over here.
And boy, we hope they don't go outta business sometime soon. Yeah, Tom, um, and we certainly work with, uh, an entire ecosystem of, you know, networking and security providers, but here at HPE, we continue to build more and more security solutions into the network. For us, the network is a security solution, right?
It is converging. And when we talk to different, especially security operators, they have many tools they're using. Some of them have 50 different products they're using right to secure on top of their network.
So we believe it's important to bring more and more of those capabilities into the network, and it helps them remove certain products that they, they don't necessarily need to maintain because they're now converged in the network. And it's also indicative of, you know, the network really becoming a strategic part of their cybersecurity, um, you know, solutions and footprint. I, I would say that's very accurate.
A lot of people don't see security as an add-on anymore. They see it as something that needs to be integrated from top to bottom. Uh, how many times have we heard the, the, the maximum of shifting security to the left, meaning it needs to be occurring earlier in the development of design cycles as opposed to, okay, we made it work.
Um, maybe we shouldn't allow everyone in the world to log into this. And I think that that's one of the values of SSE is that its integration into networking has created a fundamental base to allow this to, um, you know, be more secure. But I think maybe one of the challenges that people are facing is this idea that security by its very nature is a limiting factor.
It complicates things. How many times have we heard stories about, um, developers that have, you know, created a, a system to query things and, and it's open to the world by default because, well, I I'll fix it later, I'll add security on later. And, and then that's how you end up in the news with the, an unsecured S3 bucket that just suddenly leaked a whole bunch of PII to everybody across the internet.
Uh, how are some of the ways that, you know, solutions like yours are offering us a chance to become more secure by default? Yeah, I think so. I think policy is at the heart of a lot of this, Tom.
Uh, you know, and I think that, um, the problem that we see almost everywhere is that you have to go, you know, over here and you have to try to replicate the policy in the next place and the next place and the next place. And, you know, you want that, that policy to be unified across your entire network. And, you know, I think SASS e is doing a really good job of, of doing that at the network edge and kind of up to the, the cloud.
Um, but I think that there's an argument to be made that it should even go further down into the network, down to the switchboard or, or even access point, uh, or down to the client level with the same exact policy, um, so that people's lives do become easier to go out and do security without having this huge burden placed on them. And this is kind of one of the things we are, we think that this is a problem that needs to be solved around like zero trust. You know, there's a lot of talk around Zero trust today.
Um, if you were starting a company, you know, tomorrow, uh, it'd be really easy to go out and implement Zero Trust and say, this is our, our playbook. This is our process, this is how it all works. But that's not the reality for every company on the face of this earth where they have many years of tech debt and complexity that they have to then go overcome.
And we think that policy unification, unification of security and networking coming together, uh, and the ability to look at data at a much more granular level in multiple different places, is gonna be one of these things that actually helps get to this end result. This nirvana that we're all looking for. I when you say, uh, companies are saying that Zero Trust is, is something that they need and easy to implement, I think about all those restoration videos you see on YouTube where someone like speeds up the footage like a thousand times.
So it only took like 30 seconds to like grind something, as opposed to the fact that it really took like four and a half hours to do it. And, and it, everyone has this deceptively simple idea of, of how easy it's to deploy zero trust. Uh, you know, Chris is, are you hearing some of the, the customers that you're talking to talk about the need for Zero Trust, but then kind of throwing their hands up in the air because they're like, we don't know what we're doing.
Yeah, I mean, this has gone back and forth in the industry quite a bit. I know when, when the idea of Zero Trust was kind of first posited, um, you know, at least in its, in its most recent incarnation, there was a lot of pushback from, from enterprise around this whole idea. And then there's, then there was kind of this, you know, philosophical shift of like, okay, yeah, that's what we need.
Um, and then the reality of of wait a minute, like, how do we actually make any of this happen? Especially as Adam pointed out in a environment that's been growing organically or through acquisition over the last 10, 15, 20 longer years. Um, that's a, you know, IT estate that's gonna be really tough to modernize two zero trust.
Uh, there's another complication there, which I think, um, may have been addressed actually by some of the announcements from HPE, uh, at Black Hat this last week. But there's a fundamental issue of, you know, who's now doing these things, right? So that's the one problem with convergence is, okay, now great, you're putting security policies, you know, on my networking devices if I'm a network engineer, that's kind of interesting.
And then of course, you know, from the security side, right? They're looking at, you know, how do we interact with the network? And so you've now got potentially two teams, or two different, at least personas within the IT team working on the same infrastructure in the same, um, you know, in the same system, which, which could lead to conflicts if not managed properly.
Um, right, there's a lot of times when a network engineer looks in and says, okay, that a C L's gotta go, oh, guess what? Everything works. Um, and how many times have we seen that happen and then be left that way?
Or, or worse yet, we just had have to add one line to this ACL and it won't be hard to fix, it's just permit ip, any, any right. That fixes all my problem. Just put that at the top and you're good to go.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, of course. And Chris, I think you, you teed this up perfectly because one of the things that I love about the development on these products is that it is ongoing.
There's always something new being added, uh, that, that kind of adds feature sets that people in the real world need. And as we were recording this, it's literally the week of Black Hat, you know, everyone's favorite summer hacker camp. Um, uh, you know, uh, gentlemen, what were some of the things that came out of Black Hat that HPE announced that are kind of solving some of these challenges that, that we're seeing in the industry about around convergence?
Yeah, so we were really excited at the show because it was the first time since the close of the Juniper acquisition that we were able to showcase our combined, uh, secure networking portfolio. So that's both HPE Aruba networking and HPE Juniper networking. So we had demos, we had a lot of activity in the booth.
It was a very, very great show. But Tom, in terms of the announcements, um, it was kind of in, in this area of, of Zero Trust and Sass E right? So there were four, there were four key announcements, and we'll cover some of them I, I think a little later in the podcast.
But the first was around open cloud native nac, so cloud-based network access control for third party network devices. That means any other network, it'd be a switch, uh, you know, other devices inside of the branch that we can define a global policy across your entire enterprise. Another area was we've enhanced our, uh, application intelligence engine.
Just think of it as a library with characteristics. What are the risk scores for the application? What are its needs?
What are the characteristics? And of course, we feed that in real time as we're and learn as we're going along and, and we get data from other, um, you know, threat intelligent places. Then the third area was around Zerto and CrowdStrike.
We announced a new integration there, which helps with our ransomware use cases. But the last one that we're really most excited about is infusing AI into sass E. And so we announced a new natural language, uh, SASS e copilot.
So that's kind of a quick rundown. The guests, our guests, our audience can go and, you know, read more about it. We have blogs and press release and lots of information, but that's, those were the main things we announced at Black Hat this just this last week.
You piqued my interest. And because we were contractually obligated to talk about AI on every podcast from now until the end of time, I need to know what is it about AI copilot that makes it easier to deploy these things? Is it just me being able to ask it, Hey, what's going on?
Or is there deeper integration with AI there? Yeah, so I'll tell you that this is a significant area of investment for us, and, uh, we have a, a lot of people in r and d, um, in our engineering organization working on ai. Um, and so we think that AI is going to fundamentally transform security and networking.
Uh, you know, it's funny, when we started, uh, SD WAN many years ago, uh, our, our CEO of Silver Peak, David Hughes, uh, he used to say, uh, SD stood for self-driving. And I think that in many ways we were missing, um, something to help get us the rest of the way there. And I do believe AI is it where we are really focused right now is really in, in several different areas.
Um, the first is, you know, we wanna make it easy to perform like a security audit of your, your SASS e fabric. Um, so, you know, if I have hundreds of sites and cloud endpoints and all this stuff that I need to look at, um, you know, you, we think that you should just be able to ask and it goes out and it looks through a huge data lake, all of your configuration data, and it comes back and provides you a report telling you exactly where your security problems are, and you can go dig deeper from there. Uh, same thing for getting things like the health of the network, um, how sites are working.
All of these things are, are going be available in copilot, uh, in our upcoming. The other kind of major area that we're really interested in is, is actually in troubleshooting. Um, and so, you know, if I'm having issues with IPSec, you know, what does that process like today I go out and I download, uh, the PCAP files and I analyze them and I try to figure out what's going on.
You know, maybe a machine should be able to just do all of that for you. Uh, and so we think that this is gonna be, you know, transformative for the operator and the way that they interface with our product. Uh, and so we're, we're heavily investing in, in those things and many others in the future.
So I will admit in my own curmudgeonly state that I feel a little hesitant to deploy some technologies because I don't know what it's doing, right? Like I, it goes in and tells me it's more secure, it tells me things are better, I can ask it questions, and it's like some of the engineers I've worked with in the past, yeah, yeah, don't worry about it. It's fine, it's fine.
I took care of it. Is there a way for me to kind of verify these solutions when I look into the platform and say, yeah, yeah, it really does do the thing I think it needs to do, and it explains why it did that and why this is a better option? Yeah, so I think that the, the first thing to point out is we're not starting with configuration.
Uh, we're starting with really helping improve the operator's experience, getting more data out of your environment, kind of talking to your, your sassy fabric, if you will. Um, I think configuration will be something that we'll look at down the road, but, you know, here's the thing, you know, I think configuration would be higher value off the, you know, from the start for us if we didn't have so much automation in the product. But the reality is, you know, I myself could sit down and, and manage a multi-thousand site network with just a few mouse clicks.
And so configuration wasn't really the first thing we wanted to tackle. We really wanted to tackle, you know, getting, you know, better data out of your data. Um, and so that's really where we're, uh, focused primarily right now.
Uh, you know, it's funny, Tom, I've spent plenty of time vibe, coding. I dunno if you've played off with any of those tools yet. Um, yeah, they can get you kind of far along and then all of a sudden they don't work at all.
And so, um, I'm not kind of, uh, inclined to impose that upon our customers quite yet. So I think back to the get smart series with Maxwell Smart, one of his famous catchphrases missed it by that much. And, and I think that there's a value in that, right?
Is that we can use certain tools to get close, but there's still that value in the, I'll call it what it is. It is the last mile of getting over the line, right? Is, you know, I can, it's like any writer, right?
I can create a rough draft that has a lot of good ideas, but doesn't have a really good structure. It's when I create structure around that. And I think that that structure is, is one of the things that is helping battle the simplicity, uh, challenge that we have is people tend to think of structure as complex, right?
Like, you know, uh, everybody remembers the security thing from war games where you have the two keys that have to be turned at the same time, and that's a horrible idea, except it's really a good idea because it enforces a policy of no one person can make this decision. Uh, Chris, in your experience, does lack of structure create complexity or is it the structure itself that causes people to feel like they're overly burdened with it? Uh, well, I, I mean, it can go both ways, Tom, but, but I mean, I, I, I do agree.
I mean, proper planning, proper structure can definitely provide, you know, whether it's the guardrails or just, you know, the, the overall process or, or whatever it is, right? Without any structure at all. You're constantly reinventing the wheel, right?
You're trying to figure out how to do something. Um, and, and, and with structure there is, you know, typically a path to follow. There's some best practices there, there, there, you know, there's a reason for that structure that's guiding you down a path that that provides structure, uh, for your activities.
And so well done. I think structure can actually simplify things, and the more complex things are, the more structure you may need. Um, now that said that, that does become a little bit interesting in, in what we're talking about here, where, um, you know, in some ways a, a structured dashboard that just shows you kind of red, yellow, green and shows you kind of what's going on in your network in, in, you know, in, uh, a gooey format is more structured than a chat interface that just sits there and stares at you blankly.
And you have to know what questions to ask. And so there are some trade offs here where that natural language interface can be really empowering for the right individuals. I think, uh, it can also be potentially terrifying, uh, for the wrong ones.
Yeah, and I should point out that, you know, we're still, we, you know, we haven't gone to full chat g PT mode or anything where it's just a, that interface, right? We have a really robust UI that has graphs and a dashboard when you walk in, you know, we have tons of reports, like everything our customers come to expect from our product is all still there. This is an addition right on top of it as well that, you know, it sits alongside you and can be used to produce data.
And, you know, graphene is kind of one of these things I'm also really excited about. We get people asking us to, you know, correlate data or help create customer reports all the time. And, you know, this is something that in the future here, they're just gonna be able to go in and say, you know, help me graph out this stuff and it's gonna pop right up for them from the data that they want, not just from what we think that they need to see.
And I think that's gonna be a really powerful thing. And I would agree that one of the challenges that we face in modern networking that creates complexity is the fact that we're so overwhelmed with this data. Uh, it took us years to get to the point where we could even find all of it, right?
And now all of a sudden that we have access to things like APIs and programming, programmatic interfaces. I can get pretty much any data that I want out of the system, but then I don't know what to do with it. This is actually a common complaint that I see, not just in networking, but across a lot of places, is, you know, well think, think about something like exercise, like, here's the number that you generated for the workout that you did yesterday.
Well, is that good? Is that bad? I don't have any context around that.
And to Chris's point, if I don't have any context, I don't know what to ask. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? What could make this better?
What can I do to not make it worse? Uh, are are these some of the challenges that you guys are Seeing, uh, that, that organizations are having? Uh, and and how are you solving them?
Yeah, you know, I think a lot of those questions come in today, you know, by way of a support case, right? Or a call to an se. And, um, I definitely am tasking the team with saying, you know, did this, did the customer really have to call us?
Like, shouldn't this have been something that they could have inferred right outta the product? Like, or that it told them what they needed to know before they had to pick up the phone? Because they don't wanna make that call either.
They just wanna get what they need to get to. And so, um, we are really trying to look at this from like an improvement of experience, not, I'm not trying to just slap the AI label on the product just so we can say we have it, and you know, it was just that black hat and it, every booth said ai. Um, I do believe this is one of these times where this is more than hype.
Like I really believe in this technology. Um, and I think that it's gonna make people's lives a, a whole lot better in interfacing with products, um, in many other ways probably as well. Um, but, you know, yes, we wanna like, you know, present the customer, for example, with the prompts.
So, um, you know, when you pull up the chat bot today, it will give you a series of prompts that you can just start off with. And so you immediately have some way to know how to use it. And then at some point you can start asking questions further and further from there further.
Um, and we're doing quite a bit of work with prompt engineering and other things in the engineering organization to make sure that we're producing the right outputs for the customer as well, that we're not overwhelming them with data. Um, 'cause these systems, they have access to millions of records and firewall logs and you name it. And you guys, we've all used these tools.
Sometimes they spit out some pretty weird stuff. Um, and so how do we make sure that we put a good wrapper around it so that we're still producing a good product? Um, but giving people a new way to actually work with this.
And, and Tom, if I can add to that, you know, the topic of convergence, um, you know, you've got different users, right? Some people come from a networking background, they maybe are very knowledgeable in managing networks. That's what their core, but now these teams are converging as well, right?
Or they may have come from the security ops, but now they need to verify some things on the network, right? And vice versa. So tools like our sass e copilot really help them with productivity, jumping, you know, gaining knowledge right away, getting access to things as they're learning.
We know that teams are understaffed. We know that it's hard to hire the talented people that can run these tools. So there's a lot of value there.
Um, as, as people are crossing over between being a networking expert and a security expert. I do think, Jeff, that like the bull sprawl thing is like a really good one to call out because, you know, we're all in it here and I used many tools over the years, and you get really good at them and you don't look at them for a while and you go back to it and you're like, oh, shoot, like how did I do this again? Right?
And it's like the copilot is sitting there next to you, and it's always available to help to kind of catch you back up to where you need to be when working with any product. And I think that's gonna be another big benefit. Uh, if you go back and watch, uh, our round table discussion from our security field day event that we had, uh, earlier this year, you'll notice that the topic was the, the, the idea of a point solution tool versus an entire platform.
Uh, and there's challenges around both. There's, there's value for both. Um, but I think this, the idea of having way too many tools to accomplish all of these things, um, is, you know, I I ha to quote a famous, uh, internet chef, it's a unit tasker problem.
Why would I build something that only does one thing when I can build something that does two or three and, and get more out of it? Uh, I do want to jump back on one of the other announcements that you guys had and talk a little bit about nac, because I know that's definitely something that, uh, people find challenging to implement. Uh, and maybe you could give us just a minute about what is it about your solution being cloud native that makes it easier to deploy and manage for organizations out there that are looking to implement something like that?
Well, again, Tom, that goes back to what we talked about earlier in the podcast where we're building more and more capabilities inside of the network. So our customers, uh, have been asking for cloud native n especially the customers that are fully cloud forward, right? They're building their entire environment, uh, uh, on cloud.
NAC has been around for a long time. There's probably some people in the audience going, wow, you're talking about nac. I mean, let, you know, bring us to today.
But NAC is still very relevant in terms of access control. You know, what, who can join my network, uh, who's allowed to be on the network? And it's a very important part of Zero Trust, uh, IT and, and ss e and putting this all together.
And so we're very excited that we have this modern cloud native knack, which extends the zero trust connectivity to, you know, every device across any vendor. That's the big thing that we announced at Black Hat. So we've, we've had this knack and we've had the cloud-based knack, which we talked about at RSA as well.
But now you can have, you know, Cisco Extreme, Arista, other types of network devices in your branch. And this is, this is great for customers that, um, maybe they've done an acquisition or they have a brownfield, or they've already purchased some devices. They don't have to have everything top to bottom from HPE you, but they can, they can define a net network access control policy across all of them.
And then of course, once someone's on the network, we have a global policy manager, which helps determine, you know, Hey, can Adam talk to this particular application? Tom, can you access a certain LLM or certain data, right? And, and of course we do that and enforce, you know, a as they're on the network as well.
So we were really excited about this cloud nack. We're also excited in that it works really well with Juniper, so this is our better together. And we were showing that this week at Black Hat, basically, uh, Aruba and Juniper together.
Alright, well, as you can see, networks have become a lot more complicated over the years, and the solutions to make them less complicated also run the risk of making them less secure. Unless you have a company that has a security first mindset that is willing to embrace new technologies, both on premises and in the cloud and figure out a way to make it work so that it's not adding needless cycles to engineering and operations roles. And I think that that is something that really speaks to our jobs.
We want to be able to do more without having to actually work harder or think harder. And if it comes down to a choice between two solutions that offer, you know, roughly equivalent performance, but one of them is much easier to implement and maintain. Well, I know which one I'm going to go with.
Speaking of which, for those of you out there that might be interested in learning more about some of the solutions that we talked about today, where can people go to find that information? com and search for sass, E-S-A-S-E, and then from there it also branches out into the individual products such as WAN and our cloud-based SSE, so they'll be able to find everything. com, sass e.
Awesome. And we'll make sure to include links to that in the show notes as well. For those of you who want to just click directly there, thank you very much for listening to this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast, which is brought to you by H HP Aruba Networking.
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