The session delves into the evolution of connectivity and security, highlighting the transition from traditional bandwidth to SD WAN and SASE. Presenters Graeme Scott and Bob Greenough emphasize the importance of understanding these technologies for advising clients effectively. They discuss the challenges of MPLS and the advantages of SD WAN, particularly in the context of increased remote work due to the pandemic. The session also clarifies the relationship between SASE and SD WAN, noting that SASE is a comprehensive framework that integrates various security solutions. As organizations adapt to new networking needs, the importance of flexible, secure solutions becomes paramount.
Transcript is auto-generated.
Well, today’s high intensity tech training begins now as we take a look at the evolution of connectivity and security and the shift we’ve all witnessed as connectivity has evolved from traditional bandwidth and fixed circuits into the software defined emergence of SD WAN and augmented now by the agility, the scalability, and the embedded security of SASE and NAS.
Now as is always the case, these shifts and evolutions create massive opportunities for advisers in becoming strategic infrastructure partners. Today, we’ll learn the capabilities, the use cases, and the strategic benefits involved to help you guide your clients in their network transformation decisions.
Your comments and welcomes your questions are welcome in the chat window to which our presenters will respond both during and after today’s event. They may even show up in your driveway. Today, we welcome back to the Tuesday call, Teleris VP of network and mobility, Graeme Scott. He’s joined today by director of sales engineering, Bob Greenough. Bob, Graeme, welcome to you both. How are doing?
Thanks, Doug. Really excited to be here and excited to have my man, Bob, here joining us.
As Doug mentioned at the outset, it is cybersecurity awareness month. And so because of that, we wanted to really talk through some of the ways that cybersecurity is tying into network solutions. And, of course, what better way to do that than breaking down SD WAN and SASE? So when I’m out in the field having conversations with tech advisers, a lot of questions surround, hey.
Like, how do SASE and SD WAN kinda work together? Are they competitive products? Are they complementary products? How do we get from one to the other?
So I thought today that, Bob and I would come on here and just kind of trace through how we got where we are, what SASI is, and how it works together with SD WAN to provide a more secure networking environment. So, Chandler, if you wanna go ahead and kick it over to next slide, next slide after this one.
So I think it’s always important to kinda take a look at and trace the evolution of how we got to where we are. So if you remember, those of you who’ve been around for a while, and I know by a bunch of the names on the call here that we’ve got some veterans in the crowd, and we appreciate you guys. But you probably remember selling MPLS back in the day, traditional bandwidth, and with those were basically fixed circuits, and we had a lot of lengthy provisioning going on there. Getting network in place was really a challenge, and, we spent a lot of our time babysitting circuits as they went in and making sure that everything was up and ready to go.
When SD WAN first appeared on the scene, we really kinda talked about it in the context of an MPLS replacement, something that could come in and, you know, give you a lot of the functionality that you had with MPLS, provide a lot of the secure connectivity, and give you that option a lot more affordably and way easier to manage. So that’s how we went from MPLS to SD WAN. And, of course, as we evolve into the future, enterprises, customers, businesses out there are demanding agility and scalability. And, of course, they want that security to work hand in hand with that SD WAN solution, and that’s where we’ve kinda got into the SASE space.
And then, of course, network as a service, which we’ll talk about here at the end. So that’s kind of our basic timeline, our agenda for today. Let’s go ahead and kick it over to the next slide, and I’m gonna bring in my man, Bob Greenell. Bob is our director of sales engineering.
Bob has literally, what, Bob? Hundreds of these kinds of conversations every month. So I think if you could just, for the folks, kinda break down a little bit where we started with MPLS and how SD WAN sort of first came on the scene as a replacement for MPLS.
Yeah. And I wanna just kinda centralize on something that you have here on the slide.
MPLS has been around forever. It was the way the world ran. It still is to some degree. I mean, the backbone of the Internet is largely similar to the MPLS networks we we’ve seen in, you know, large enterprises.
Right? But of the main reasons being it is incredibly reliable. But drawing attention to, and this kinda sets up why the move to SD WAN, but the rigid point to point links, specifically the word rigid. Right?
These are predefined routes, things that have to be thought through and configured beforehand.
Like, first and foremost, you have to talk about where the Internet drain is. Right? Essentially, where does the traffic from all these sites in the network have to go to get through out to the Internet? Is it centralized model?
Like, you set up there in a centralized hub model? If so, pretty big single point of failure. Yeah. So you have to start talking about redundancy, building that in.
If a link goes down, you can maybe build up some meshing where you can get, you know, maybe end around that outage and go through a different site. But the meshing, just use your imagination as to how complex that can get. I mean, literally, just spaghetti, throw it against the wall, what it could look like. Right?
And we’re not even talking about using BGP for failover and that sort of thing. So that’s what’s kinda driving this, I’d say, agnostic as far as connection and providers. Right? You mentioned it’s a replacement for the traditional MPLS.
You’re spot on there. But what we started seeing though because of the flexibility of SD WAN was it was a tool for the migration away from it. It wasn’t a rip and replace, which is scary for any network administrator, any systems administrator. It’s absolutely terrifying.
What you could do is turn turn up the SD WAN solution and start building your policies, your failover, your routes, all that kind of thing, and then gradually moving sites over. And, eventually, you get to a point where you unplug the PE router that’s handling the MPLS, and you’re up and running on a new SD WAN solution. And so it made in addition to being a replacement, it really enabled the the, you know, the move to itself. That makes sense.
Yeah. Absolutely. And I think, you know, not not only was it incredibly complex as I think you laid out fairly well there, I think that number on the bottom really hits home why a lot of businesses embrace this technology. Forty percent cost savings.
As we know, those of you who see me do an Ascend event, you know, businesses ultimately care about two things. Right? Making money and saving money, and forty percent is a pretty hard number to walk away from. So SD WAN really transformed the way businesses networked in, more of a distributed site type architecture.
And then that forty percent savings, I think, was super significant for most company most companies here. We’re at about a seventy percent adoption rate as of last year with SD WAN. So I think that really tells you how we’ve evolved from MPLS. And that to your point, Bob, it’s still out there.
We we just we still see it every now and then, but just much, much less common.
Yeah. Exactly right. And by the way, you’ve I think we’re getting to this a little bit later in in kind of the the timeline. But the rise of cloud and everything moving to the cloud and how, we had to find creative ways to get there, efficient ways to get there, that really kind of, again, forced to move away from the MPLS model to SD WAN. I mean, you could spin up an SD WAN device in AWS or Azure just, I mean, like that. Just go to the the marketplace to spin it up.
Yeah. Yeah. I love it. So let’s go ahead and move on to our next slide.
What I wanna do here is we’re gonna kinda go through a case study. So this is an example of where SD WAN was a real effective tool for this organization. So in this case, Bob, we have a distributed enterprise. Right?
They’ve got multiple locations across the geography.
They had MPLS in place but had some challenges there, and so ended up moving over to SD WAN. So kinda this is a very typical conversation that you guys would have had a couple of years ago.
Kinda walk us through where this would have started and how we would have got to where we where we have SD WAN deployed.
Yeah. So the the challenges you mentioned, that’s typically where almost all of these start. And, of course, just the cost, the first one you mentioned. Right?
They’re looking at this build. They’re literally hemorrhaging money. They’re like, there’s gotta be a better way to do this. We’ve been doing this for twenty years now.
Technology moves fast. What are we what what should we be doing? And that’s typically where the conversation comes to us. Right?
But, the the SaaS application performance is a is a really common refrain around MPLS. If you’re really, really good, if you’re a top level CCIE guy, you can get the MPLS, just humming along. No problem. Right?
But that’s a CCIE person, and that’s somebody who’s commanding a lot of money to do that for you. So with the SD WAN, again, using that as a tool to kinda move over to a a more agnostic solution, a lot depending on the provider, the SD WAN suppliers can have, it can be a plug and play solution. Now when you have all of these distributed locations, that too becomes a lot more palatable. Right?
So you don’t have to have a truck roll. You can literally have these boxes shipped out to somebody, color coded cables, color coded instructions, and really anybody that can turn a screwdriver can set this thing up, plug it in, and turn it on, and it’s ready to go. It’s rocking and rolling. So from a retail chain and anything really distributed like this as far as locations goes, that’s incredibly that’s tasty.
That’s a tasty carrot.
Yeah. Yeah. I love that. So, you know, end result here, a lot of these organizations moved to SD WAN. We can see the value of that change. All the characteristics of SD WAN provided a tremendous amount of value.
You know, some of them similar to what they had in MPLS, but a little bit of enhancements there. Again, that big number at the bottom there, this case study here, thirty five percent cost reduction and faster point of sale. So it’s all about money at the end of the day. Right?
That’s that’s really what it comes down to for organizations. You’ve gotta be able to show that ROI. So alright. So there we are.
We’ve got SD WAN. It’s deployed. It’s doing its job. It’s doing things. But then the world changed.
Right around, oh, I don’t know, twenty twenty, we had a fairly significant out incident that happened here globally.
Anybody wanna jump in the chat? Let us know what that is. I think you know what I’m talking about.
Get one guess. Yeah.
They they got one big guess.
In twenty twenty, what happened that changed a lot of things? And, Chandler, if you wanna move to the, to the next slide. COVID. Yeah.
That’s right, Andy. We had COVID hit. And what happened during COVID? Well, things shut down, and we basically told everybody, hey.
Take this laptop and go home. Okay? But the problem was people still needed to work, and people still needed to access all of these applications, all of these things that are existing, you know, within the enterprise. So we had a new problem that we had to solve.
Right? We had all of these remote workers that needed to get access to things, and so we needed new tools to talk with SD WAN, and SASE was born.
By the way, fun fact. The term SASE came about from Gartner, in twenty nineteen. Talk about timing. Yeah.
Just in time. Yeah. I mean, you nailed it, Graeme. So this wasn’t you know, when we went through this, it wasn’t your typical IT cycle and that you had months or even a year to figure it out.
Right? Idle change management? No. Just threw that out the window. It was close it up, get everybody home now.
There was maybe there was some time. Maybe you had some laptops on on hand to send people home with, but generally, you didn’t. I mean, especially if everybody was, you know, at at at a single location. So and even if you decided, like, okay.
Let’s get everybody laptops quick. By the time this was happening, by the time the shutdown was happening, supply chain was already substantially disrupted. Right. So there was no guarantee you’re gonna get them on time.
There was long story short, this was all done on the fly. And we went from having a pretty well defined managed and understood network edge, and we flipped that overnight, hundred and eighty degrees. In that moment, if you ask somebody to diagram the network, the current network, I it’d just be a big question mark on on a Visio. That’s Right.
Yeah. Yep. Yeah. So, you know, all of sudden, have this massive shift in traffic, as you said.
Right? Eighty five percent of traffic now flows directly to the Internet destinations, bypassing all of our traditional security. We’ve got massive issues with breaches. We’ve got, as a result of that, network outages.
So all of a sudden, we’ve got these challenges. And to your point earlier, Bob, we also needed to make sure that those individuals that were working remote had access to all of these cloud applications that we needed them to work with, and it had to be reliable. It had to be safe and secure. So SASE came about.
And, again, to your point, it had been really kinda just coined right before that. But what SASE really was was a framework. And I think, you know, it’s really important to kinda understand this distinction. It’s not necessarily a product.
It’s basically a framework where we can bring together a series of products to work together, to work in unison, to achieve the goal of a safer, more secure network. So, Chandler, if you wanna go ahead and move to the next slide.
So here’s kind of a a a a breakout of the evolution. And and, Bob, if you wanna kinda walk us through this, we’ve touched on a few of these things, but, really, this is kind of illustrates well, I think, how we evolved to this and where the need for a different approach, I e SASE, came into play.
Yeah. And, again, using we’re gonna beat the heck out of this or we have beat the heck out of it already, but the pandemic forced all of this to happen almost immediately. It had been building for some time now.
You know, I mean, back in the day, it was just basically a firewall at the edge and maybe you had if you were fancy, you had some web filtering software. Like, what was the one back in the day? Websense, I think. Yeah. If you were working and you try to go to website, you shouldn’t. It would pop up the bad monkey kinda, you know, window and tell you you can’t do this. And maybe your manager was notified depending on the severity, but that was it.
In came, like you said, the pandemic, and it forced us to kinda reevaluate. Okay. How do we kinda bring this all under one roof, under a a a framework? Right?
And a lot of people say, well, what’s the difference between SD WAN and and SASE? What’s you know, explain the difference. And then really, they’re two totally different things. SD WAN is a product as you mentioned.
Right? SASE is the framework.
SD WAN is just one of the many products. You got the soft the the web gateways, the CASB, ZTNA, firewalls. All of that kinda comes together under this umbrella and makes it gives you a a direction. One thing I wanted to mention though, a lot of people shouldn’t say a lot.
It’s frequently, misunderstood that to be to implement the the the SASE framework, you have to do all of this. You don’t. You could take pieces and you know, depending on what your your business needs are, depending on where your employees are, you don’t have to have all of this. But, it’s it’s just a framework to guide you along that path, if that makes sense.
Yeah. Absolutely. You know, kind of a framework where we can add these pieces to the framework based on what we need for our organization.
You know, maybe we don’t have a lot of remote workers. We don’t need hey. We don’t need the zero trust. I mean, would argue that a lot of people. You still probably should have it. But, yeah, there’s a lot of different components, and SD WAN is one component of the overall SASE picture. So when we look at the Teleris landscape and we look at the suppliers that are in it, you know, small, medium business, and mid enterprise in particular want to buy these kind of products from one supplier.
And as such, it’s been marketed as SASE. It’s a product. But in reality, again, it is a framework where you’re combining multiple products together into a cohesive strategy to deliver a secure and reliable network.
Well said. Yeah. Cool. Here we go.
Alright. Cool. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna run through a couple of examples here for you, a couple of examples of where an organization evolved from an SD WAN environment, added these elements of SASE to provide them with the outcome that they wanted, which, again, was a safe and secure network. One piece of information that I wanna make sure that everybody kinda sees before we move on from this slide, sixty percent of enterprises will implement comprehensive SASE strategies by the end of this year.
Okay? So that’s in the enterprise space. We know that, you know, in mid market and SMB, that’s gonna be a little bit less as they kinda lag a little bit. But if you’re somebody who lives in that SMB space, you sell lots of mid markets, you know this is coming, and it’s good to understand what it is, how it works, and how your customers can benefit from it.
So we’ve got a couple of quick case studies we’re gonna run through here, and then we’ll open it up to any questions. So let’s go ahead and move to the next case study. I think, Bob, this is know, speaking of the pandemic, the health care was one that was tremendously impacted. Right?
We saw a lot of change there. So kinda walk us through how this organization or or or a a health care provider would have started with an SD WAN environment. They were probably already using SD WAN and then had to add all these elements around it to build more you know, to utilize that SASE framework.
Yeah. So and by the way, health care, there’s health care, government, and finance. Those three verticals are exceedingly slow to move in the change. So the fact that they made this big change at the speed they made this change after the pandemic really shows you how critical that it became people suddenly became aware, like, hey.
This is a problem which we need to solve for now. Right? But with this specific one, I think it’s important to show the difference between what is difference between VPN and ZTNA? Right?
VPNs basically just offer secure encrypted tunnels for data transmission. Okay? They they really don’t do anything outside of that. They give you access into a network.
That’s it. It’s especially handy on public Wi Fi networks, ensuring privacy and security. Right? But the problem with VPNs, just the VPN, apps and any other controls, you basically now greenlit that device and that user full access to the internal network.
And then, again, going back to the pandemic scenario where it was impossible to send everybody home quickly with a a secured laptop or some sort of device like that, you’re basically just telling people, hey. Download this VPN client on your machine. Get logged in. You’re good to go.
You don’t know anything about that machine. Right. You don’t know if it’s already been compromised, and now you’re letting this on your network. Right?
So when we brought up the the the concept of zero trust in that it’s the concept of least privilege, And absolutely every user, every device, every act every resource that’s accessed, whether it’s cloud, whether it’s on prem gets challenged. There is no implied trust like there is with a VPN. As as it says, zero trust. And it’s least privilege, meaning you only have the access to the least amount of things that you need to do your job or that the device needs to function or whatever it happens to be.
The other thing was as we scattered people off, the, you know, there’s gonna be some other terms we’ll talk about, CASB and all that kind of thing. But where where the ZTNA, the network access really shines is when you have that highly distributed remote or even road warrior workforce accessing applications. You might not know where they are. Are they in the cloud?
Are they on prem? Are they everywhere? Right? So that’s the strength of it. And that’s really what kinda sealed the deal for this one.
Yeah. So I always like to talk about ZTNA versus VPN. Like, if I go to a bar, right, if I get through the door at the bar, I I can go anywhere I want now. Right?
I can go order drinks.
I can do whatever. Whereas ZTNA is more like, okay. Great. I get ID’d at the door.
When I go to sit down and have a drink, I get ID’d again. I get up. I walk around and come back to the bar. I get ID’d again.
I wanna go into the back room, the VIP area. I get ID’d again. You know, just this constant verification of who you are. We’re not gonna trust that you’re legal and you’re supposed to be here.
So I I love you know, this was something that was adopted and, you know, we had to get there really with with everybody being distributed. The attack vector on organizations just became so much wider that you had to have a way to protect, you know, the these this data transmission coming from remote workers. So so good example here. Anything else?
I mean, let’s talk a little bit about the CASB type environment. And, obviously, in this scenario with a health care provider, HIPAA was a concern. So how did these some of these SASE solutions address that?
So HIPAA’s fun. If any of you are really, really bored and you wanna sit and read through the security rule within HIPAA that is kinda governs what we do, there’s a lot of ambiguity there. You’ll actually see a phrase called reasonable and appropriate and with no explanation of what that means. There are some things that are that are actually hard requirements.
Right? And don’t press me on what those are within HIPAA at the moment. But there are also things that are considered addressable within HIPAA. And what addressable means is we we say you should do this.
But if you can’t do this, in lieu of that, you have to then document the policies, procedures, and safeguards you put in in in effect in lieu of that. One of those is encryption. A lot of people assume that, hey, everything, data at rest, in motion, whatever, it’s gotta be encrypted because HIPAA requires it. It doesn’t.
It’s addressable.
Where that came into play, especially with the VPN thing, VPNs, as it says, they it’s overhead. They you know, there’s performance hits. There’s all sorts of things that you you just don’t want from a remote workforce. Right? You want them high speed, low drag. So the ability to move to something like a ZTNA, get rid of that overhead, and still have the reasonable and appropriate measures in place documented would satisfy those HIPAA I shouldn’t say HIPAA requirements, those HIPAA bullet points. Let’s let’s call them bullet points.
Yeah. And I love that. Right? So in this example here, we we meet the compliance standards of HIPAA as vague as they are in some cases.
Right? But we meet We’ve got faster access for our remote clinicians, our staff that is out there doing their thing. And overall, because we put all this into a framework and everything talks to one another and everything works together, we’ve reduced our overhead. We don’t have all these different portals.
We don’t have all these different things going We’ve created an environment that is much more simple to manage for that IT staff. Chandler, let’s move on to the next, case study here. Another great scenario where SASE has been fairly fairly well received is in the manufacturing industry. And, Bob, walk us through, you know, kind of a typical manufacturing type environment and where, you know, in this scenario, SASE really kinda helped this customer out quite a bit.
Yeah. So manufacturing’s, an interesting one. There are an incredible amount of devices, whether they’re IoT, whether they’re IP based or not, that, typically get overlooked from a security standpoint. Right?
And some of these things might be, reporting to a cloud service somewhere. And absent any other, you know, absent CASB or something like that, you really have no visibility into how it’s communicating. Right? So CASB, cloud access service broker or cloud x cloud access security broker, excuse me, I can say that.
It’s typically something you see more commonly in a manufacturing or a heavily on premise business. Now, again, you see there’s two services listed here. Right? We talked earlier about how you don’t need to have them all. You can see this one only used to a firewall as a service in CASB.
We get a common question about, well, why wouldn’t you go ZTNA in this instance? Why go CASB? Why go firewall as a service? Excellent question.
You guys are full of them today. There’s a lot of overlap in the problems that they solve, being honest. But there are two main differences. CASB is typically something you see when you don’t have that highly distributed workforce.
Right? Maybe it’s just everything centralized here. There’s manufacturing location, accessing cloud resources. That’s it. As I mentioned earlier, though, ZTNA is the better choice for if you have everybody kind of wandering around.
They’re all over the US. They they scattered their sticks to the wind. You have no idea where they’re accessing the applications, sometimes over questionable Wi Fi. Pro tip though, maybe you have a hybrid, and you can do both.
This wasn’t the case with this one here, but, yeah, the the CASB piece was huge. That was that was the big one with all of the IoT type devices and but how do we know what the what the heck they’re talking to or, you know, how they’re interacting with the cloud services?
Uh-oh.
Did we lose you, Graeme? Yeah. I’m back. Gotcha. Alright.
Got got some work going on.
SD WAN at your house? Secondary circuit? Just curious.
Yeah. I do. I it just took a little minute to fail over there. I am the wireless guy.
Right? So I’ve got my wireless back up. So I do apologize about that, folks. We got some work going on at the house here, which is, causing some challenges.
But, Bob, I’m sure your explanation was spot on. I, I kinda missed the first part of it. But the one the one thing I love about this is we talk about remote workforce. It’s not always people that are connecting to the network.
Right? In this case, it’s things. Right? IoT space, it’s things. And, again, we’ve got different tools in the tool chest where we can address the issues of access based on the needs of whatever that thing is.
Right? It can be people. It can be, you know, IoT devices, whatever it is. We give them the proper access.
We give them the access they need in an efficient manner. So love the example of the manufacturing because it really highlights how the different needs of different devices can be present. So Absolutely. Let’s go ahead and move on here.
Chandler, yeah. So let’s just sort of break it down again. So where are we going with all this stuff? Right? So we’ve we’ve talked about where we started with the MPLS, little evolution to SD WAN. We talked about how now we’ve brought sort of SASE into the equation here.
And and, you know, really, single vendor solutions are becoming more and more popular with customers. Right? They wanna buy as much of this from one supplier as we can, somewhere between eighty and eighty seven percent depending on which, study you look at.
Let’s talk a little bit quickly, Bob, just about what’s next. Right? We’re hearing a lot about con, you know, conversations like NAS, network as a service, and all of these tools as they evolve. Talk a little bit about how you see that kind of merging with SASE, with SD WAN to provide a truly flexible, scalable, and agile secure network for end users.
Yeah. So bringing all of this together under network as a service, which which I think you’re gonna see. The the SASE conversation, SD WAN, they’re gonna be it it’ll look like the individual point solutions that are SASE. Now all of it rolled under kinda network as a service, which basically is defined as anything.
You’re talking about the connectivity. You’re talking about the infrastructure. You’re talking about all of that as a manage entity. Right?
And to your point, more and more people are looking for, know, a single handed shape. They’re looking for somebody that can source all of this. And it’s not necessarily that they’re looking for this as, well, we wanna reduce head count.
What they’re realizing is this is moving so fast. And the threat vectors are changing. They’re just they’re all over the place. They can’t keep tabs on it. They need somebody to augment their team. And that’s where we’re seeing kind of the single throat to choke, single hand to shake, whatever you wanna call it.
They’re benefiting from the economies of that scale. Sorry. Just looked at that question that came up in the chat. Spot on, Chuck. Thank you.
So, yes, the network as a service conversation, I think we’re gonna be seeing a lot more of that. To your point, if I have ten conversations or even a hundred conversations about, you know, multiple point solutions and how we do this, I’d say probably ninety percent are how can we do this under one single pane of glass, so to speak.
Yeah. Yeah. So, lots to look at, lots to keep our eye on for what’s coming down the pipe here. Chandler, let’s go ahead and move to our next slide here.
I think just to kinda wrap a bow on this if we can, you know, SD WAN really kinda came in and solved performance issues. Right? We had challenges with MPLS and some of the things were happening. It made it easier to perform for the network to perform.
SASE came in and solved not only that performance by utilizing the components of SD WAN, but also brought security into the mix, brought those two solutions together along with others in a framework that not only made the network perform, but made it secure. And I think that is the the chat the sort of wrapping this all in a bow, putting that together.
So any comments there, Bob, before I drop some, some discovery questions for the full I was yeah.
I would say selfishly, you know, when I have these conversations, having this framework to kinda talk through things and and then kinda lead into individual point solutions rather than going the other way makes the conversation so much easier for us. And I think it makes it more palatable to the customer as well. When you could start at a top kind of idea, a framework, and then address individual point solutions, identify a problem and say, okay. We got this piece we could plug in. We could put this, you know, plug this piece in. From my end, it makes things a lot easier, and I I think it does for the customer as well.
Yeah. I mean, great point. Right? I mean, you know, I always say this. Nobody really wants to buy a product.
They wanna solve a problem. Right? And so you gotta really identify what the problem is, what’s what’s the challenge that they’re having, and then we can find the solution under that SASE banner that makes the most sense for that customer. So let’s move on to our last slide here, Chandler.
We’ve got some great discovery questions here for you folks out there. I know you’ve got a lot of customers out there. You’re wondering, hey. How do I start the conversation?
How do I see if there’s an opportunity here for a SASE solution?
And, Bob, I think you nailed it. Right? It’s really about diagnosing problems that are happening within the business. So we’re not talking about SASE.
We’re talking about hybrid work. Right? How has hybrid work impacted your network and security posture? Right?
Has that created challenges for you? You’ve got remote workers out there. How do you manage their access to the tools that they need within the organization?
Another one here, are you still managing MPLS circuits or legacy VPN infrastructure? When we hear somebody say VPN, I mean, I think we should be looking at that. Hey. That’s a great opportunity to talk about how that technology’s evolved.
You know, VPN doesn’t really solve the problem anymore, and I think that’s the key. Right? It it used to, but it doesn’t really anymore. It’s become so much more sophisticated.
It needs to evolve. Another question here.
By by the way, Graeme, on that previous one, really quickly Yeah.
The MPLS thing, legacy VPN, this is one of those conversations where you absolutely need to be talking to somebody above the person managing It has to have buy in from the decision makers. I mean, we say that a lot, but this is really one of those where you have to because you’re likely gonna get a heavy amount of pushback from the doers. Right? The people managing it.
Simply because it’s what they know. They’re likely at a point in their careers where new stuff might be scary. You might get that arms crossed kinda. You’re not gonna come in here, dismantle my network, replace me mindset, which is unfortunately alive and well.
So make sure you’re having that specific one. Ideally, all of them, but this one especially at that top level.
Yeah. Really, really great point, Bob. Thanks for jumping in on that one. That’s a that’s a really good one.
And these last two questions here, you know, we are in cybersecurity awareness month, so they’re kinda focused around the security aspects. How many security vendors are you currently juggling? Right? Do you have a lot of different point solutions?
Because remember, SAS is just a framework. A customer can go out and buy all these things on their own. The challenge is managing it all together and making sure they all work as one cohesively to accomplish the goal and solve the problem. So if they’ve got a bunch of different solutions they bought, hey.
How can we bring that under one umbrella and help you guys manage that better? So, again, the problem is really management of it. It. Not that they don’t have the tools.
It’s managing those tools. And, Bobby, you guys see that all the time.
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, even when we you know, somebody comes to us saying they, they’re looking to refresh their firewall, so they hit doctor Google. Right?
And there’s just a ton of noise that comes at them. So they come to us and say, hey. Help us help us, you know, get through this noise and get to the signal. What are we really looking at here?
And and then when you bring somebody to the table, they can even drill it down distill it down even further and make it kind of an easy button.
Yep. Love it. And then finally, do security policies follow the user, or are they tied to the buildings? You know, that’s one that we kinda hit a lot.
You’ve still got some organizations out there that are fairly antiquated in their approach to this kind of stuff. Things have gotta change here. Things have got to evolve to meet the demands of the modern workforce. So let’s go ahead and open it up there for any questions.
Chandler, bring Doug back here. Doug, a pretty lively chat, it looks got a lot. Yeah. A pretty lively chat. Yeah. Any highlights there you wanna bring?
We got Bob the expert here, so let’s, let’s drill him with some of these questions.
As we as we kicked into this, there were a lot of questions around the differences between SASE and SD WAN, and I think we addressed those pretty well. But then one of the interesting facts that you brought up was the migration that occurred during the COVID, particularly period of time. Are there industries that were either making moves at that time or industries that have come alive since then that are still struggling with how to take care of those same issues at this point in time. And given where we’re moving into NAS and other evolutionary technologies, what considerations can remain, and what are the new considerations, especially around security and who’s providing it, that we have to take a look at?
So what I’ve seen is, we’re we’re a new normal now and that we are definitely mostly a hybrid workforce. However, there’s some industries that, you know, the first chance they got, nope. Call them all back. Government was a big one to some degree. Federal government, I’d say, is a big one. Finance, of course. So we’re seeing a lot of people come back into the office, but there are some I’d say actually every other vertical almost.
Not so much health care like like the actual hospital facilities, but just about everything else that supports health care are allowing that they’re embracing this remote workforce. So these conversations now for them are just they’re it’s a constant reminder. It’s a constant refresh with them.
And then anytime, of course, something pops out at Von Gardner, you know, we’re we’re having to address it and they come to us with it. But yeah. So finance, government, those are the ones that have been resistant to it and have kinda pulled everybody back into the office and away from the hybrid workforce.
Yeah. I think the the the story there that I get is there really is no one size fits all. Right? Every every even within an industry, you’ve got companies that take a different approach to this.
And I think because of that, you you really need to dig in on that discussion. Right? When there’s choice, when there’s flexibility, there’s opportunity for us as tech advisers to go in there and help navigate that. So, you know, under that SASE framework, which pieces, mister customer, best support your environment with your employees?
Right? Is it zero trust because you’ve got a distributed enterprise, or is it more of a CASB type environment where you’ve got people in a building? So, you know, those are the kind of questions you wanna ask, and and it really is a no that it’s not one size that fits all. And I think that’s kind of the big, the big takeaway there.
Yep. Even the manufacturing industry, the one we talked about, they typically have some sort of remote sales workforce. You know, they’re they’re they’re out there beating the streets. It might be small compared to the rest of the business, but they’re that’s gonna be a hybrid conversation. Yeah. Absolutely.
Robert’s asking here just, in the chat if there are resources that advisers should be looking at and taking advantage of as they try to determine not only what are the availabilities of solutions, but what they can best ask their clients and discover from them in terms of evaluating those needs.
Yeah. This is a tough one for a matrix. You know, I know people love matrixes where you can kinda line it up and say this one’s got this and this one’s got this. This product is kind of a tough one for that because it really is so specific to the business and what their environment looks like.
Rob, I would just recommend looping in the sales engineering team. Bob and his team are just you know, they’re they’re really well versed. They spend a lot of time doing this. They have dozens of conversations every week kind of focusing on these types of solutions and what might work best for each customer in different scenarios.
So there are some resources out there. We do have some materials. The suppliers have provided materials. We’ve got some education materials as well. We don’t really have sort of a matrix for this. It’s a it’s a tough product to do that. And, Bob, I don’t know if you wanna add to that.
Yeah. And adding on to what you said, or drilling down further, it’s a it’s an incredibly dynamic conversation. So when you start talking through these, it’s very often that you go in thinking you’re gonna be talking about firewalls as a service. But then as you dig down into things, it you might discover something like maybe a breach they had.
And you learn more about what that how that breach happened. You’re like, woah. Hang on a second. We’re well beyond firewalls as service.
We gotta start looking at something else. So it’s really tough to do if then statements for that conversation, although we certainly tried with, you know, solution view and whatnot. But, yeah. TLDR, bring us in.
We’d love to talk about it.
Yeah. And just to I don’t think, Hass Josh Hazelhorst and I have a Inside the Win episode coming out to that highlights exactly what you said, Bob, a conversation that started with a firewall upgrade, a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in MRR later. The only thing we haven’t sold them is firewalls. Right? So so that conversation definitely evolves, and sometimes the customer, what they think they need isn’t really what they need.
And Spotting.
Team is here to help you guys with those conversations.
I’m not sure we’re allowed to get through, any HIT training without, discussing AI just a little bit. And AI, of course, has brought around an increased need for connectivity, for power, for security. As we talk about this evolution in connectivity options and companies that are considering their next move, what role does AI considerations play in that decision?
Yeah. I mean, I think just to be general on AI, I think there’s a couple of things that I’ve got my eyes on. Number one, as far as what’s going on with today’s network, and, Bob, I I I don’t know if you agree with me on this. Just the stress that AI is putting on existing network infrastructures, just the demand is tremendous.
So if you if you have any cracks, any fissures within the network architecture, those things are about to be exploited. Those things are about to bust open as these customers start to do their AI journey. The other piece that I have my eye on is you know, we talked a little bit about NAS and network as a service. You’re gonna see a world here pretty soon where, you know, with network connectivity, you’re not even gonna need to place an order.
AI is gonna do it automatically for you. When they see a bottleneck, they need a little more bandwidth, AI will just go out and procure additional bandwidth for whatever it needs it for and then scale it back down. The AI ops conversation, which I know we’ve touched on a couple of times in the hit series, Very interesting, and that is a space that I’ve got my eye on. It’s continuing to evolve.
Bob, I’ll throw over to you on on the comments there.
Yeah. The other since this is, you know, a security conversation, governance risk and compliance, you know, GRC, that is now people are becoming more and more aware of what’s possible with AI. And even when we think we got our hands around it, something else becomes possible.
The the the issue now is that with the meteoric rise and, really adaptation of an adoption of it, it’s forcing these conversations about I mean, even at, like, the state level. You know, AI is being weaponized at some point. So we have to have these conversations. What’s ethical?
Do we need to revisit the Geneva Convention? I mean, things that we wouldn’t have even thought about had AI not taken taken off like it did. So from and by the way, there’s also an education piece there that I run into where there’s a lack of familiarity that they’re they don’t even know that they’re using it. When I ask them, are you so what are doing today with AI?
They’re like, well, nothing, really. You know? And they go to their website as a chatbot.
You know? So, there then you realize where you’re starting. You’re like, woah. Okay. We gotta start with education.
But then, unfortunately, we’re having a back end of the GRC conversation. I use that when when I realized it’s a big education piece. Let’s start with the governance risk and compliance conversation. Make sure that the right data is going into the LLMs, the right people have accessing it.
It’s, you know, not hallucinating and all of that kind of thing.
Yeah. And last point on AI. We’ve talked a lot today about what’s coming into the net like, coming in to get network resources. Right?
Really, we gotta have a conversation also about what’s going out to these AI engines. Right? What kind of data your employees are sending to ChatGPT and those kind of things? You know, we really wanna start to put some protections around that and make sure that that, you know, proprietary information, proprietary data, whatever, you know, you’re talking, is not going out to those kinda engines.
So, you know, talked a lot about what’s coming in or trying to get in. We also need to look at what’s trying to get out.