With your network now reaching much further than the boundaries of your offices, managing an enterprise network is much more complex than ever before.

Kentik’s mission is two-fold.

1. To make life awesome for people building the connected world

2. Deliver one comprehensive observability platform for running all of an enterprise’s infrastructure.

During #TFD27, Kentik presented their SaaS-based Enterprise Network Observability Platform. Their platform can receive telemetry from various sources using integrations and agents. With this data via powerful analytics, they can provide network managers with automated insights to resolve issues, improve performance, control standards and much more.

During the demonstration, they showed a number of powerful tools that were able to troubleshoot various issues, including conducting root cause analysis over an application configured in a hybrid infrastructure.

I liked their platform's ability to configure various tests to help monitor the network and application performance. These are able to be configured to take place from agents you have installed across your network or public agents accessible over the internet across the world. This allows enterprise network admins the ability to receive insight from a variety of standpoints. Further to this, the visualisation capability within the platform was fantastic. The two examples below show visualisations, first of BGP routing and secondly of a complete network topology within AWS.

When managing a largescale complex enterprise network, these tools will be invaluable to ensure you have visibility across not only the networks within the offices but across datacenters, into the cloud and beyond.

You can see my doodle covering Kentik’s presentation below and be sure to check out the presentations on the TFD website.

To learn more about Kentik check out their website here.

I recently joined the awesome Tech Field Day crew for #TFD27 taking part in a not so sunny silicon valley. Unfortunately for me this time I joined remotely but that didn’t stop the content being as awesome as ever!

First up at #TFD27 was Men&Mice presented micetro a management and orchestration solution for DNS, DHCP and IPAM (DDI).

There were two specific elements I really liked about micetro. The first is the fact it is an overlay tool, not aiming to replace your existing tools but abstract the management from them whilst improving workflow and orchestration. The second stand-out point for me was the comprehensive list of supported solutions that they were able to manage.

During the demonstration, they were able to show unified management of DDI across Linux, and Windows as well as cloud-based solutions in Azure, AWS and beyond.

Recorded live in Silicon Valley as part of Tech Field Day 27 on March 8, 2023. Watch the entire presentation at Men&Mice Presents at Tech Field Day 27 - Tech Field Day

DDI is such a critical element for organisations, and with the introduction of cloud and multi-cloud requirements, the complexity of managing it is only growing. micetro allows administrators to have a single point of truth across multiple solutions allowing corporate standards to be set, maintained and monitored across the multitude of implementation points. Many organisations today rely on an Excel spreadsheet to try and manage DDI, so a solution like micetro can infinitely improve this experience, savings time, improving security and offering enhanced functionality.

Check out my doodle from the presentation below.

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If you would like to learn more about Men&Mice, check out their website here.

You can also get a free trial here.

Commvault has recently released its semi-annual platform release introducing new capabilities across the hybrid cloud. Check out my video and doodle below for more information regarding what you can expect in this release.

Features within this release include

• Google Cloud Regional Snapshot support

• New Data Protection support for DevOps Protection

• Oracle Compute Infrastructure (OCI) Storage Tiering

• Improved backup times for Hadoop File Systems (HDFS)

• Enhanced security integrations with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms

• Compliance Lock – Protect critical data with immutable storage

• Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

• New security enhancements & certifications help improve security posture and compliance.

In my doodle below, you can see my thoughts and further information about this release.

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Further to this, Commvault has released a blog post drilling into these features
Commvault Platform Release 2023

You can now watch the Commvault webinar covering this release on demand using the button below.

During VMware Explore I attended the VMware EUC keynote. During this session Shankar Iyer, Shawn Bass and others dug into the every changing world of hybrid working and how VMware aim to assist.

The session is now available to be viewed online if you have a VMware Explore account
VMware Explore Video Landing

One of the most important aspects for me to hear during the session was VMware’s focus on digital employee experience and not just the technology. It is important in the hybrid world of working that experience, security and productivity are at the front of our technical strategies.

You can read more about this session over at the VMware End-User Computing Blog at the link below

Workspace Security and Digital Employee Experience, intertwined: Conclusions from VMware Explore 2022 Europe - VMware End-User Computing Blog

Please find my doodle with my key thoughts from the session below

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Whilst at VMware Explore in Barcelona I attended this awesome session regarding the new features in vSphere 8. This session was hosted by Dave Morera and Himanshu Singh both from VMware. Much of the session focused on how vSphere 8 can now be used in many hybrid configuration with vSphere+ as well as the new hardware architectures allowing vSphere to make use of DPU’s for offloading of processing.

If you would like to read more about vSphere 8 be sure to check out the blog linked below.

What's New in vSphere 8? | VMware

You can see my doodle below capturing my key thoughts from the session.

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Does your network infrastructure work for or against you!? We recently attended Juniper’s AI in Action conference to learn more about Mist and the Marvis Virtual Network Assistant (VNA) technologies.  

Vendors have long been talking about the power of AI and how it will help to enhance our businesses. For many organisations, this seems like a pipe dream. However, it is safe to say that the AI technology built into Juniper Mist is a prime example of how AI can be of practical assistance.  

During the AI in Action conference, we first heard about the history of Juniper Mist. Next, we heard how customers have leveraged Mist to improve the employee and customer experience. Finally, we saw demonstrations of the technology in action. 

Your network infrastructure is arguably one of the essential components of your IT set-up, connecting your users and customers with their workloads and data. However, it is safe to say that networks have remained largely the same, aside from speed and capacity improvements, and are as complicated to manage as ever. 

This is where Juniper’s experience-first networking tackles things differently. Whilst Juniper remains a leader in terms of performance and capability, the Mist AI-powered technology improves both user experience and manageability for the admins. 

During the conference, we heard how Service Now was able to reduce its service tickets by 90% by using the AI. 

Mist AI proactively monitors more than 150 states on the network before analysing what they mean with the Mist AI technology. As a result, Mist can highlight issues and critically report the root cause of problems, even when it isn’t a network-related issue. The customers on the panel said that this functionality had saved substantial time and helped resolve long-term problems. 

One example given was that when a network issue is detected with an endpoint, an automatic packet capture could be started and stored in order to dramatically cut resolution time. This allows the problem to be resolved upon the initial report, rather than needing to wait for another instance before it can be diagnosed. 

The presentations demonstrated how the Marvis Virtual Network Assistant can diagnose an issue with a Teams call from a text-based conversation. Once the admin had used Marvis to pinpoint the problem, Marvis Actions allowed the admin to explore and resolve the issues. In some cases, Marvis Actions can auto-resolve the issues by undertaking actions such as adding mission VLAN takes, fixing port configuration and more.  

However, the power of the Juniper Mist platform doesn’t end with the AI. Customers also spoke about how easy it was to set up. For example, one customer migrating from Cisco shared how the Juniper devices can reutilise the Cisco base plates. In some cases, this allowed the task of installing the APs to be passed to end users. The customers found that installing a new AP could take as little as 22 seconds from start to finish.   

The final demonstration - and the icing on the cake - was showing how to set up a complete branch office. The demo included setting up an edge router with the relevant security and SD-WAN configuration, a switch with VLANs and PoE, and a new AP. From start to finish, thanks to the cloud management and pre-defined intelligent templates, it took just 6 minutes and 47 seconds. 

With many users and organisations demanding greater flexibility and an improved experience, the network needs to change to support these demands. At the same time, we see a skills shortage and increased demands on IT. With the intelligent technologies demonstrated at the conference, it is clear why Juniper is leading the way with its Mist AI technology. 

You can read more about the Mist technology here.  

The roadmap session was the third session I created a doodle for at Commvault Connections 2022. Be sure to check out the other blog posts and doodles at the links below.

1. Commvault Connections Keynote

2. Customer Panel

3. Roadmap

The roadmap session built upon the fundamental principles of the Commvault strategy with further insight into the direction and products that are coming. It is clear that Commvault takes a high level of pride in its ability to connect with its users, their community and listen to what is needed. One of the statistics that was shared was the fact that four hundred product enhancements in the last year have come from direct customer feedback.

Key to the Commvault strategy are the following three principles

1. End-to-end data visibility

2. Broadest Workload Protection

3. Faster Business Response

You can see further detail regarding the announcements and planned focus areas in the doodle below.

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This is the second in my series of blog posts regarding Commvault Connections that took place at the beginning of November 2022. You can check out the other blog posts and doodles at the link below.

1. Commvault Connections Keynote

2. Customer Panel

3. Roadmap

The customer panel session was surprisingly one of my favourite sessions. I say surprisingly as these sessions can often become a beauty parade of customers who tell stories about loving the vendor.

This session was different, covering real-life stories that CIOs were going through as part of their organisation’s digital transformation.

Taking part in the session was Michael Mathews (Vice President of Technology and Innovation at Oral Robers University, Reza Morakabti (CIO at Commvault) and Isabelle Guis (CMO of Commvault). Throughout the session, there were lots of lessons from the trenches shared by Michael and Reza. They talked about the need for IT to change to a customer service-centric entity.

Some of my favourite sound bites from the session can be seen below.

Reza Morakabati

IT are a service delivery organisation and the users are our customers. The users have become much more sophisticated and technologically aware. IT now has to be more consultative working with the users for a common goal.

Michael Mathews

IT needs to endear themselves to the business and the users. IT needs to be the good stewards of the data. Technology needs to work better at work (office etc) than at home. IT needs to be 100% available and easy to use.

Michael Mathews

There has never been a greater day to be a good CIO, but never a worst day to be a mediocre one!

Michael Mathews

It often isn’t possible or right for IT to own everything in-house. Great partnerships with specialists are needed especially with things like security.

Michael Mathews

IT needs to walk in the shoes of the user to understand where they can provide value.

Michael Mathews

The biggest challenge right now is managing in an ever-changing world. Technology is no longer a science but an art! The CIO needs to be the maestro.

Below you can see my doodle with my key takeaways.

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Commvault Connections was a great opportunity not only to hear an update from Commvault on their strategy but also to get insight into wider technology trends and real-life insights from customers. Across the conference, I created doodles for three of the sessions. You can find the links to the other sessions below.

1. Commvault Connections Keynote

2. Customer Panel

3. Roadmap

Keynote Thoughts

The keynote was led by Commvault’s fantastic CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani. Sanjay is a great keynote speaker, always giving great clarity and getting through the fluff to the points that matter.

There was a theme across the conference about innovating with confidence. The keynote set about explaining what this means and the backstory behind how we got to where we are today.

Ultimately IT professionals are now responsible for delivering the dreams of the organisation and its leaders. But delivering the dreams isn’t enough on its own it needs to be done in a managed and secure way.

To deliver these dreams, IT and business professionals have turned to SaaS applications and multiple cloud resources to achieve what is needed. Whilst these disparate resources have allowed for an increase in innovation and a reduction in time to value, it has led to massive complexity around security and data protection.

Mirchandani explained that your data has a higher value to not only you but also attackers, which has led to an increased need to protect and secure.

He explained that IT professionals need the right tools to gain control of these disparate workloads, offering the confidence to the business that they can innovate with confidence whilst IT ensures that everything is professionally managed, protected, and secure. These tools are exactly what Commvault sets to deliver.

Several technologies were discussed to help with this overall goal. This included Metallic Threatwise, an early warning system that proactively baits, deceives, and surfaces bad actors. Threatwise makes it harder for hackers to find your organisation’s valuable data, reducing their dwell time to help ensure you aren’t compromised. This was a completely different approach from those I have heard of before, especially for it to be included as part of a data management platform. I look forward to digging more into this in the future.

Also discussed was Commvault’s breadth of portfolio, offering protection across not only a wide range of solutions but also across on-premises and cloud technology with a unified management solution in their Command Center product.

It was clear that Commvault’s approach focuses on simplicity and flexibility across its portfolio.

You can see my doodle from the keynote below, covering the key elements that stood out to me.

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After a busy week at VMware Explore 2022, we wanted to reflect on our week. We discuss our experience of being back at live events, what sessions we enjoyed, what we have learnt and of course the key take aways.

Check out our video below to hear our final thoughts.

One of my favorite sessions at VMware Explore 2022 was the Microsoft General session. This may seem odd to many of you, but for me this is where I see many customers on their journey managing both VMware and Azure based technologies.

In this session Jeff Woolsey covered the Azure VMware Solution (vSphere running in Azure) and the Azure Arc technologies including Azure Arc for vSphere (Managing your vSphere environment from Azure).

For me it was a great session with a mixture of technical deep dive, evidence based case studies and demonstrations.

Here is my doodle.

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Here are my doodles from the VMworld 2022 General Session taking place in Barcelona. The key message behind the event was the need for organisations to move from a cloud first strategy to one of a cloud smart strategy.

You can read more on this on my blog post

There were lots of announcements covering VMware’s technologies from vSphere 8 and vSAN being GA, a free tier of VMware Aria Hub being made available and much more. you can check out most of the news from VMware in this post.

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My second day of VMware Explore was just as jam-packed as day one. I started the day by attending the Microsoft Keynote, hosted by Jeff Woolsey.

Jeff discussed how over the past two years, we have gone through unprecedented change and how this has shifted our focus and objectives as an industry. One message that resonated with me and reflected what VMware presented in the general session, is the message around a cloud smart strategy. Jeff discussed how it is unrealistic to believe that we will have all apps and data in the public cloud, but actually the reality is that we will use hybrid & multi-cloud.

The two key technologies discussed in the session were Azure VMware Solution (AVS) and Azure Arc for vSphere.

Azure VMware Solution

Jeff discussed how AVS allows you to run a vSphere environment within Azure. Therefore, you are able to use the familiar VMware infrastructure you know (and love), within the cloud. Throughout the session, Jeff discussed different use cases where AVS can be extremely beneficial.

The first use case was for organisations that want to migrate their workloads to Azure with simplicity and ease. This may be good for people that are starting their cloud journey or that need to move their workloads to the cloud quickly. The most important factor that Jeff stated and emphasised was that with any move to the cloud, it should always be planned correctly. This resonated with the ‘cloud smart’ message from VMware.

The second use case was to be used for Disaster Recovery. With AVS, you are able to replicate your vSphere workloads on-premises to Azure.

Azure Arc

Azure Arc simplifies governance and management by delivering a consistent multi-cloud and on-premises management platform. Arc allows you to configure, manage and secure your environments regardless of where they are located.

Jeff discussed how this technology is able to save organisations time and resource as it is all centrally managed, allowing teams more time to innovate. We also saw a customer case study from Greggs. It was interesting to hear first-hand how this food chain was using Azure Arc to free up their time to be able to innovate and plan for the future.

It was great to learn more about these technologies and ultimately, it was great to see how Microsoft and VMware are coming together to give customers the best experience, regardless of the technology they use.

vSphere 8 updates

Following this session, I attended the overflowing vSphere 8 session to learn more about the new innovations and features that are introduced with vSphere 8. There was lots covered so I have summarised the key announcements:

• vSphere 8 introduces a cloud consumption interface bringing self-service access to IaaS

• vSphere 8 builds a flexible and open ecosystem of DPU solutions

• vSphere 8 supports higher complexity AI & ML workloads

• vSphere 8 allows you to monitor your workload power consumption so that you can make sustainable adjustments where necessary

In the afternoon, I took the time to explore the expo floor. It was good to learn more about what VMware partners are doing to innovate and ultimately help their customers. There was a lot to learn about the new products from partners and some great conversations about the industry. In my opinion, this is a key element that we miss at virtual events and is great to be able to immerse myself in the industry again.

And lastly, as always, it was great to attend the VMware party. This year, the band was Simple Minds, who put on a great show and of course it was great to catch up with more of the community. I am looking forward to the last day today and learning even more!

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @BizTechMeg to keep up with my live snapshots, short vlogs and more throughout the event!

At VMware Explore 2022, taking place in Barcelona, VMware spoke about the need to escape cloud chaos by being cloud smart. VMware suggested that a cloud first approach adopted by many organisations had led to lengthy refactoring programs with extended time to value for many organisations.

From my perspective I have seen similar cloud first approaches turning to chaos led by a uncertainty of where to start, leading to a lack of innovation and paused initiatives. Equally those that have started have failed to do so in a manner that drives business value leading to increased costs or security concerns.

VMware’s cloud smart approach is to offer a unified platform and set of tools that embraces the hybrid cloud, alongside the acceptance of migrating workloads to the public cloud, whilst refactoring where business value can be gained.

Microsoft echo’d this message in their session at VMware Explore whilst talking about their Azure VMware Solution (VMware Cloud Foundation in Azure) and Azure Arc for vSphere (on-premises vSphere management and operations from within Azure). The Microsoft presenter explained to expect every workload to be refactored or indeed even moved to the public cloud was an unrealistic and unhelpful expectation.

Irrespective of the right Cloud smart solution that will work for your organisation in a hybrid / multi cloud approach, now is the time to move away from setting a strategy of cloud first without much substance and moving to a business outcome driven cloud smart approach.

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The general session is always a favourite of mine at VMware Explore because it gives such great insight into what the vision of VMware is, what the focus is for the organisation and of course, there is always some great announcements thrown in for good measure.

Check out the video below to hear my thoughts and what my key take aways were from the session this year.

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @BizTechMeg to keep up with my live snapshots, short vlogs and more throughout the event!

Today was the first day of VMware Explore 2022. The event was kicked off with a general session which is always a great opportunity to learn more about VMware’s vision, key announcements and new technology.

The session was kicked off with VMware’s CEO, Raghu Raghuram. Raghu’s key message of the session was focused on shifting focus from a ‘cloud first’ approach to a ‘cloud smart’ approach. VMware found that many with a cloud first approach actually didn’t achieve what they wanted to as effectively or efficiently as they would like. This ineffective cloud first approach has now led to cloud chaos!

Raghuram believes companies that adopt a cloud smart approach can move from disparate teams to a consistent cloud strategy, providing better experiences and a more secure strategy.

The keynote moved quickly with lots of content and announcements from a number of great speakers. Some of the key messages and announcements were:

• How we need to innovate to reduce energy costs and ultimately help ourselves in the future

• vSAN 8 & vSphere 8 are Generally Available (GA) as of today

• That VMware Cross Cloud services give you consistent experiences across any cloud and we need to accept that it is inevitable that businesses will use multiple clouds, not just one.

• Flexible working is here to stay and 75% of organisations recognise the Digital Employee Experience needs to be a top priority

• That organisations need not only to try and prevent Ransomware attacks but have the right tools in place to recover from an attack. An attack happens every 11 seconds, so you need to be able to recover to a good point as quickly as possible. VMware Ransomware Recovery can help.

• And there were some great customer stories from Mclaren and Llyods Banking about how VMware have allowed them to innovate and improve their experiences

Following the general session, I attended an influencer & press panel session with a number of VMware execs, hosted by Joe Baguley. It was great to hear a little more about the company’s vision and get some real detailed answers about various areas of the organisation, building upon what we heard in the general session.

There were great questions and discussions about the Broadcom acquisition, reducing carbon footprint, security and more and it was great to get these insights from the exec’s first hand.

After some lunch and a catch-up with the community, I joined the EUC solutions keynote hosted by Shankar Iyer. The key message from this session was focused on how work has fundamentally changed, and we need to adapt to ensure that the employee experience is consistent and personalised to enable employees to work effectively.

Shankar discussed how organisations also need to bring together experience and security and make sure they are balanced. Many don’t get this balance right and it can either put too much emphasis on security, negatively impacting the experience, or prioritising experience over security and putting your business at risk.
A big focus of session was about automation and how with automated tools and processes, we are able to do more with less. There were some great customer stories and demonstrations that discussed and showed how these organisations are using automation to improve experiences without impacting security.

Lastly, Shawn Bass was on stage demonstrating and discussing some of the Workspace ONE technologies and the autonomous workspace in action. This was a great insight into how this technology can work and actually see some real benefit it can bring organisations.

Whilst my brain was full of content and I was busy digesting all that I had already heard throughout the day, I took a lap around the solutions exchange to learn more about what is happening in the industry. Tomorrow, I want to spend longer in the solutions exchange to learn more about how these VMware partners are enabling businesses and improving experiences, whether that is related to cloud, employee experiences or security.

I am already excited for another day of exploring tomorrow!

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @BizTechMeg to keep up with my live snapshots, short vlogs and more throughout the event!

In this video I give you a tour through registration and onto the Hands on Labs and Breakout hall. If your at VMware Explore be sure to say hi.

My second session at ChefConf 2022 was ‘Config Management Isn’t Dead’ by Brittney Woods, Manager - Server Automation, H&R Block.

This was a great session based on Brittney’s learned experiences using Chef for config management across multiple roles. Brittney is a fantastic presenter and hopefully, we get to meet her hermit crab and hamster in her next presentation 😄.

This really is a session you must watch to get the most out of the content

https://prgress.co/3cSJtgI

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My main take ways from this session were as follows

1. Configuration Management is about much more than deployment alone. It is about continuously managing you configuration. Only with good config management and compliance can you understand drift over time and ensure your solutions remain in compliance.

2. Configuration management is about much more than just VMs. Configuration management extends to containers and the cloud as well.

3. Using configuration management to manage images for VMs and containers can ensure compliance and expedite delivery.

4. Configuration management can and should be integrated with infrastructure automation platforms like Terraform.

5. Chef can be used to ensure that your resources always comply with CIS benchmarks and DISA-STIGs etc

6. Config Management is a critical component to allow the barrier for entry to be lowered for developers who need to innovate faster whilst ensuring security and compliance

Watch the session for yourself

https://prgress.co/3cSJtgI

Disclaimer: Tech Doodles through Tech Crossing Limited has been paid by Progress to create content covering ChefConf22. Whilst Tech Crossing Limited and the authors of this blog post have been paid to create the content, there has been no influence or editorial control by Progress.

The first session I attended at ChefConf 2022 was the roadmap session with Prashanth Nanjundappa, VP of Product Management Progress Chef.

You can watch the session yourself at the link below.

https://prgress.co/3ARHT6N

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Prashanth was joined by his colleagues to review the progress they have made over the last year and their plans for the year ahead.

Presenting alongside Prashanth was:-

Stephen Blankenship - Principal Product Manager - Infra, Desktop and Application Delivery

Sharan Rayakar - Principal Product Manager - Compliance and Security

Nischal Reddy - Principal Product Manager - Platform and Cloud

Looking Back

Over the last year, it was discussed how there had been a focus on making the products easier to use as well as ensuring they deliver quicker time to value.

To this end the following features have been worked upon or improved over the last year.

1. Flexible deployment models

   1. On-Premises

   2. Chef SaaS

   3. Marketplace Deployments (Azure and AWS)

   4. High-Availability Deployment Models

2. Automation of Infra Views

   1. Allowing users to undertake increased management tasks from the UI rather than just the command interface. This makes the product easier to use and to pick up for inexperienced users whilst advanced users can continue to use the command interface.

3. Data Feed

   1. Send Chef Client Run and Compliance Scan data to 3rd party tools like IT Asset Management and Config management solutions.

      1. Webhook Integrations

         1. ServiceNow

         2. Splunk

         3. ELK

         4. Custom

      2. Storage Integrations

         1. Amazon S3

         2. minio

4. IoT and Edge Management

   1. Using Chef Habitat to manage all applications and dependencies across and IoT estate.

      1. This has been proven to save management time and increase efficiencies.

5. Chef Cloud Security - Chef CSPM

   1. Chef Cloud Security allows users to assess their cloud infrastructures in AWS, Azure and GCP against up-to-date best practise and compliance guidelines.

   2. Container orchestration platforms such as Docker and Kubernetes are also supported.

6. New Audit and Remediation Content for Chef Compliance

   1. A large amount of new audit and remediation content has been added to Chef Compliance, allowing support for new and updated OS’s and Apps.

Looking Forward

As the session turned to look at the roadmap there was a discussion regarding how Progress had engaged with their users and the Chef community to decide upon the roadmap items. The highest voted requests were, Easy upgrades, support for scheduling push jobs, integration with IT operational support systems, support for agentless models and the ability to manage container environments.

Based upon this feedback the forward-looking roadmap is going to focus on the following three areas 1. Ease of Use and Upgrades, 2. Job Orchestration and 3. Hybrid Cloud and SaaS. It was explained how moving forward they are going to take a platform approach building a unified and extendable Enterprise Automation Platform.

Key messages from the roadmap included

• General Availability of Chef SaaS at the beginning of 2023

• Persona-related insights to be added to Compliance and Security, allowing users to identify relevant insights quickly and to remediate as required.

• Chef CPSM will have improved flows with fewer clicks allowing quicker time to value across an increasing number of cloud resources.

• The Chef Client will support rolling updates and centralised management with the ability to support two client versions simultaneously for cookbook compatibility.

• Job Orchestration Service - Will have a push-centric model with granular control allowing jobs to be run on a reoccurring basis with exception supported. It will also support jobs to be run based upon conditions.

• Workstation will have the introduction of a frequent actions UI

  • Based upon user research, it will enable new team members and non “Chef experts” to be productive in Chef faster.

Watch the session: https://prgress.co/3ARHT6N

Conclusion

It was interesting to hear directly from the people managing the products, learning what had been implemented over the last year and the direction of the products moving forward. I was impressed by how the product roadmap had been driven by direct feedback from the users and the community.

It was clear there is a big focus on ease of use and value to the users. I particularly like the sound of the SaaS platform for ease of adoption, the persona-based insights, and the ability to check cloud infrastructure compliance quickly and easily.

You can watch the session yourself at the link below.

https://prgress.co/3ARHT6N

Disclaimer: Tech Doodles through Tech Crossing Limited has been paid by Progress to create content covering ChefConf22. Whilst Tech Crossing Limited and the authors of this blog post have been paid to create the content, there has been no influence or editorial control by Progress.

Trying to ensure your network is secure often seems like an impossible battle. Many security and network operation teams often face a losing battle of an ever-growing list of software, aiming to ease administration and secure the network. The truth is, more often than not, this software ends up creating further information silos and adding to the barrage of information for the already bewildered specialists to try to understand.

I was recently given the opportunity to attend an exec briefing with some of the security team at Juniper Networks to understand how their approach differs.  

As always I have summerised my findings in the Tech Doodle below.  

Before I delve a little deeper into Juniper Security Director Cloud, let me share with you my top 3 thoughts: 

1.  Juniper Security Director Cloud is a subscription-based service avoiding additional hardware requirements 

2. Juniper Security Director Cloud works well with Juniper and third-party solutions 

3. Juniper Security Director Cloud has intelligent policy management and can make reactive changes based upon threat analysis  

Juniper Security Director Cloud is an as-a-Service subscription-based solution meaning there is no need for additional hardware or complex initial configuration. As mentioned above I was particularly impressed with how it offers customers support for a number of third-party technologies as well as the wealth of solutions within Juniper’s portfolio.

Core to Juniper Security Director Cloud is the belief that the network itself should become threat-aware.  

Utilising in-built intelligence, Juniper Security Director Cloud is able to protect every connection from client to workload from on-premises to the cloud.  

Juniper Security Director Cloud utilises a unified policy set irrespective of the device, but importantly the automation capabilities allow for deduplication, rule precedence and error avoidance within the policies. Critically, Juniper Security Director cloud is not only able to help you monitor your estate, but also make reactive changes based upon threat analysis.

Many organisations are looking for solutions that are able to simplify and centralise security operations. Not only should they help reduce the burden of multiple siloed solutions, but should also look to use intelligence and automation to help proactively protect the network. This is exactly what Juniper Security Director Cloud sets out to achieve. For organisations that are looking to implement SASE (Secure Access Secure Edge) principles, the fact that Juniper Security Director Cloud supports third- party solutions will allow for Juniper Secure Edge solutions to be implemented alongside existing solutions whilst transitioning.

Juniper is also ever innovating in this space and recently announced the addition of CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker) and DLP (Data Loss Prevention) into their Secure Edge offering.

It was good to learn more about Juniper’s approach to security and SASE. For me I am really looking forward to seeing this technology in action. A single unified approach to policy and intelligent threat analysis coupled with reactive changes is a very powerful mix. I hope to be able to share some demonstrations of this technology with the Tech Doodles readers soon.

You can learn more about Juniper Connected Security at Black Hat 2022 on booth #2240.

Disclaimer: Tech Doodles through Tech Crossing Limited has been paid by Juniper to create content following the Juniper Networks Analyst, Influencer and Media Global Summit 2021. Whilst Tech Crossing Limited and the authors of this blog post have been paid to create the content, there has been no influence or editorial control by Juniper Networks.